The Shape of Rain

UNSAID

Caroline left on Friday morning. She easily embraced Ruth at the door, as if it were what she had done all her life. Then she turned to Mira, held back for a second time, looking at her appraisingly, like the bridge engineer assessing the load, and hugged her as well. Brevity. Firmness. Hugged by someone who didn’t hug carelessly.

“Keep updating the newsletter,” she said, releasing her from the hug with an absolute stone-cold face.

“That’s your piece of advice,” Mira said. “Nothing like being nice to my brother or something.”

“The newsletter one is for the store,” Caroline replied, picking up her handbag. “The other one is self-evident.”

She got into her car and drove off on the gloomy Friday morning, and Mira stood in the doorway watching her depart and felt something which wasn’t what she expected to feel. Something like being noticed. Not evaluated and accepted, noticed.

Ruth appeared next to her.

“Well,” Ruth said.

“Well,” Mira replied.

They went in.

Elliot messaged at noon.

"What did she say to you?''The truth. Not the surface truths.''

Mira pondered the text for a little while before responding. She was seated at the back table, eating her lunch, Ruth's remaining pasta, cold, which was oddly more delicious than it had been when it was hot and the shop was quiet in its midday lull, and she felt like she was right inside an important moment in time.

''She asked me what I wanted,'' Mira responded. ''From you.'' Straight up.

There was an unusual pause.

''What did you say?''

I said, ''I didn't know yet. But I knew what I didn't want.''

Again, a pause- that's truthful; she said the same thing.

Honesty is the highest possible form of compliment, he messaged. She once told a client his design was honest. He cried. Mira laughed loudly by herself in the back of the store. Shocked herself by it.

Did it turn out okay? The building.

It's still standing, he wrote, so yes.

She put her phone down and ate her cold pasta and watched the rain fall on the back window and thought about buildings that had been built to last, that had lasted, not because they were perfect, not because they were designed ideally, but because they held the weight they needed to hold, in the places that needed to bear it, just things getting on with the job they'd been constructed for.

February arrived in the way it always did, unwilling, the shortest month but somehow the heaviest, Bell weather being at its most stripped-down, with fewer holidays to cushion the edges, less reason to be anywhere warm, the rain and the river and the cold weighing down on the town as if it was winter pretending to be finished. Mira had picked up running.

Not that she'd picked it up, really, more that it had picked her up, one sleepless morning when she'd wandered downstairs at five thirty and found the store too quiet an hour for her to be wandering around in her head and gone out for a walk and found herself walking faster, running, really, in old trainers that bit heavily at her feet as she ran, breath burning, past the rain-slicked streets of Bellweather, before anyone else was out to see her.

Three times a week, then four. She bought better shoes. She learned which streets held water after heavy rains and which were quick to shed it, and which route homeward took her past the river at just the right angle to see the light bend in the February dark, however little there was of it. She did not tell Elliot.

She did not know why she hadn't told him. It seemed like something that was hers, this small dark hour, before it had been something he could have known about. Ruth knew, in a way, because Ruth knew everything that happened within fifty meters of the store. She said nothing of it aside from leaving extra towels on the bathroom rack in mornings when she'd had to wake up early in order to run, which was Ruth's way of saying everything. The small press began in February, but not really.

There was no actual launch, no formal announcements, only that Mira drafted the submission guidelines while she was at it, and she drew a logo on her laptop for a little while, a small stylized bird and a fern, for reasons of her own, and sent it to Ruth, who looked at it for a long time before saying yes, and then something else, entirely, in a tone of voice that suggested there was considerably more.

She emailed Patience Okafor. This took her three drafts and a good amount of nerve to write. She was nobody in the publishing world. She had no connections, and barely any money. What she had was her store, her growing little community there, her newsletter with three hundred and twelve people on it, and the confidence of six years in the business, learning all the tricks and all the pitfalls. She hit send.

Patience replied four hours later.

''I've been waiting for somebody to ask, she wrote. Let's talk.''

Mira sat at the back table, her phone in her hand and the message glowing on the screen, heart full to the brim with something warm and familiar that she'd imagined countless times before but never felt quite like this.

She tapped on Ruth's shoulder.

Ruth read the email, set her phone down on the table, picked it back up and read it again.

"David," she said finally, not a question, merely stating his name, saying it out loud because it needed to be heard, needed to be heard by someone, anyone, when it had gone so long without being able to.

Mira looked to the table until her eyes cleared enough to see it.

She saw Elliot that Thursday evening.

He'd just finished his shift, the same tired look around his eyes that he always had, but tonight he seemed lighter somehow, or maybe just less weighted down. He settled into the green chair, and she brought him coffee anyway, and he didn't argue, and she didn't ask, and by this point in their friendship they'd stopped pretending that they needed anything but the comfort of familiarity.

The group was smaller than usual that week, just Owen, Diane, and a new girl named Sera who had moved to Bell weather two months ago, if she was telling the truth, which she might not have been, and who showed up every Thursday evening with the desperate hunger of someone who had looked and looked and looked and hadn't found a single person willing to build her a community from whole cloth, until she found them.

They talked as they always did, about the novel Diane had been reading, which was quietly upsetting and deeply sad and concerned about a woman returning to her childhood home after her mother's death, and as always, it spiraled outward from there, into deeper waters, until they were discussing things that no one wanted to say outright, because it was too serious and too sad and too true.

"Going home," said Sera, thoughtfully, "is usually about permission, isn't it? To be who you were before you learned to be someone else." The room fell silent for a moment.

Elliot was staring at his coffee.

Mira was staring at him.

"I think that's right," he said. "I think the whole thing with coming home is really like... finding the version of you that was there before you began editing."

"Before the world got to you," Owen said.

"Before you get to yourself," Elliot said. "That's the more difficult one. The editing process you undergo."

Sera nodded as if he'd said something he was very glad to say out loud. And afterward, when the guests had filtered out, and Ruth had climbed the stairs, and it was just the two of them with the last of the wine and the rain on the glass, Mira said, quietly:

"Patience said yes."

He looked up. He had been expecting it, in a way, because she'd told him, in increments, over the last few weeks. Testing him, he suspected, as she was apt to test everything these days, in conversation, not in action.

"To the first title," she said. "Her second collection. Finch and Fern Press."

He stared at her for a moment.

"Mira," he said.

"I know."

"That's - that's real."

"It's real," she said. And smiled. And he smiled back, and it was a moment of something unspoken and perfect.

They sat with it for a while, the wine, the rain, the amber glow of the lamp, the particular quiet that came with two people who had built something up in parallel and separately and only just now realizing they might build something together.

"The fellowship deadline is in three weeks," he said finally.

She looked at him.

"I know," he said. "I'm just.................... saying it out loud."

"Have you decided?"

He looked out the window at the rain, the slow, irregular rivulets of water racing down the glass, each one finding its own path.

"Not yet."

"Okay."

Just that, not another word, not a question, not an entreaty, just okay, which was its own kind of answer. She was here, and she was not going anywhere, and this was his decision, and she would still be here when he made it.

He looked at her with those grey eyes.

"How are you so................... " He stopped.

"What?"

"Calm," he said. "About things that aren't calm."

She thought about running, the miles before dawn when the streets were still and dark and hers for the taking. About the rain on her face at five thirty in the morning, the way it had given her something to hold onto, something to keep the other things in, the unspeakable things that had no shape of their own.

"I'm not calm," she said. "I'm just..................... I've learned to hold things without gripping them."

He was silent for a long time.

"I'm still learning that," he said.

"I know." She looked at him. "You're doing better than you think."

He didn't say anything, but something in his face had softened, had lightened. They sat until the wine was gone, and the rain had fallen to a quieter patter, and the rest of the world had gone to sleep. When he finally stood to go, she walked him to the door, the two of them falling into the same easy rhythm, the same kind of quiet conversation that only came with the long, slow drinking of wine and the soft hush of rain on the windows. The cold of January had eased, just slightly, into something that might have been February, and that was an improvement if ever there was one.

He paused in the doorway with his coat on, looking at her.

"When I figure it out," he said. "Seattle. Whatever I decide. You'll be the first person I tell."

She looked at him. "Okay."

"Not Ruth."

"Don't tell Ruth I was first."

"Obviously." He smiled, the corner of his mouth lifting in that way it did when he was almost smiling but not quite. She was always watching him, always seeing the little things. And she knew, right then, that he was smiling.

He said goodnight.

She said goodnight.

He walked out into the February night, and she stood in the doorway until he turned the corner and then a moment longer. The rain continued, as it always did. But something was different, tonight, and she knew it, and she suspected he knew it too. They were closer than they'd been this morning, by some immeasurable but undeniable amount.

Like the rain on the window, falling slowly, then all at once.