The rain sometimes smells different in summertime, like something heavy, dark gray stone. Sometimes it smells like the river God has gone upstairs to spend some time with his mother.
She must have been sick that year, because the summer was full of the smell of it. The summer we were supposed to learn to drive, but instead were always waiting for the weather to clear up, especially when the rain brought down tree limbs, supplicant.
That summer Dad was always calling us down into the basement, for help, he said, but now in my memory I can imagine him watching us getting taller, our limbs spilling and slipping out of doorways and out of clothes and never at home. He must’ve always felt this afternoon or that afternoon would be the last afternoon we would be his kids. His daughter, his son.
We’d walk down the stairs with thumping duck feet when he called, into the basement where he’d point at little cracks forming in the walls from the bottom seam which seemed to get a little bit bigger every year.
“I’ll have to have that looked at someday soon,” he’d say, “or this whole place might come crashing around our ears.”
Upstairs, Mom would pass us red emergency candles and we’d feel the paraben wax rubbing off on our palms. We’d go out on the porch and run our hands under the rain falling off the gutter, watching the water pool in tiny oceans and then wick away leaving us to study our still-dry skin. We pretended it was a super power. We pretended it ran in the family.
When we went back inside, the light from the candles would flicker and shadows would bloom and wither on the blue wallpaper in the living room. Mom would tell us that story about how the first time she knew she loved dad was when he brushed dandruff off the shoulders of her black jacket and didn’t understand why it was something she’d get embarrassed about.
One week that July the power went off for 3 days straight. A massive old oak had fallen at the top of our neighborhood and brought down power lines. We walked up the hill that first morning to see it. Where it’d fallen, the oak’s branches had clawed wounds into the clay and dirt. The roots had been pulled up out of the ground and left behind a cavern. We looked in at it through the criss-crossing root system and it was filled with water. We wondered together if that was what made it fall. If the ground had gotten too soft.
On the third day Dad walked up to Home Depot and bought a generator and went down in the basement to try and get it running. We were out in the yard when it happened but when we ran inside after the shriek and saw Dad’s palms there was gray blue smoke pouring out of them like a flood. The phone was ringing.
Dad looked at his hands and then at us, then pointed upstairs at the sound of the phone.
“Did I do that?” he said.
The power came back on early the next morning, but the shock left a web of pink scars running up his hands to his wrists, thin and splintering.
Years later, we always said they reminded us of those satellite images of river systems. Or of diagrams of arteries. Or of lightning.
