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Lost in Rainfall

The church bells ring as my father gets beaten to a pulp on Buford Street. I watch. Too

young to do anything. Too small to even try, I convince myself. The men doing the beating are

younger than my father, but I can still see the bags under their eyes and the wrinkles starting to

form on their cheeks, their age beginning to show.

My father isn’t bleeding yet. Actually, he is. A bit, nothing more than a bloody nose but

still it dribbles down his face. And maybe there are some tears too, to be honest I can’t really

remember, but let’s imagine there are. Just a couple, inching their way into the asphalt where

splatters of his blood already begin to pool.

There’s a crack, a particularly large man kicks-in my father’s elbow and the arm falls at a

weird angle. I cry out to him, but several hands hold me back. Big, strong, calloused hands and

that’s all I remember about the crowd that watched the fight. No faces, no clothes—just hands.

There's a collective inhale from the crowd. I wished someone would step out and stop it, stop it

all, but no one does. My father’s face grows more bruised and soon it’s matted in blood-dried

hair and he lies in the fetal position, completely still. The church bells stop and I can hear an

ambulance in the distance, screaming. On the sidewalk, I see my father cry.

While in the hospital, he files a lawsuit. When he finally gets out (the only remnants of

the attack a still-healing arm and a crooked nose), he represents himself in court. He loses. His

assailants were caught, but on some technicality they are released and, for a while, my father

doesn’t allow me to go outside. Your time is better spent in here, with me, he says, you’ll have

plenty of time to play outside when you’re older. And still I sneak out the back door and play

soccer with some kids a few houses down, protected by the fact that I live in a mild suburbia and
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the most exciting days are when the ice cream truck rolls through. Of course, I am far too young

to know that nothing is ever “over,” and I begin to notice the same men who beat up my father

around my street. Walking down the sidewalk, pausing in front of our house. I never ask my

father about them, but he seems to be perpetually tense. He often glances out the window, makes

phone calls in the middle of the night in hushed tones. Sometimes I listen in, hear words like

unsafe and phrases like it’ll happen again and then I don’t sleep for the rest of the night.

Soon after he loses the lawsuit, we move further out of town. My father says he needs a

change of scenery, but I struggle to figure out why he prefers our new house over our old one.

The old one was bigger anyway, and I had friends. This one is in the middle of nowhere and even

though my father won’t admit it, it’s barely standing. The only part I like is the crown molding

around the living room, cracked in certain places but I know my mother would’ve liked it. It’s a

pale blue, much more vibrant than the browns and faded greens of the rest of the house, and I’m

not quite sure if it really matches but there are days when I stare at it for almost an hour, try to

reach it and brush my fingertips across. I’m too short, but I like to imagine that one day I’ll be

able to feel it with ease.

In school, we learn about the Nazis. Our teacher shows us a photo of all the shoes piled

up from people killed during the Holocaust. All singles. Some of them look like they could

match but at that point they were too gray to tell. My teacher asks us what we can tell her about

the showers, and two kids raise their hands, eager to prove what they know. The rest of us are

silent and let them talk for us.

The next day, I ask my father if he learned about the Holocaust in school.
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“Of course,” he says. “Everybody learns about the Holocaust at some point.” He keeps

his eyes on the road, we’re driving to school.

“Did you ever see the picture, the one with all the shoes?”

“What?”

“The picture with all the shoes from the Jews before the showers.”

“Ha. That rhymed.” He thinks for a second. “No I don’t think I have.”

“Mrs. Hennigan showed it to us today in class.”

“What’d you think?” He makes a left turn and we start getting into downtown.

“It was really sad.”

My father doesn’t respond for several seconds. “Yeah, well the Holocaust as a whole was

really sad. Just awful.” He waves at a few people as we pass by the deli.

“Why’d they do it then?” I ask. My father takes another couple seconds to respond, his

words chosen carefully.

“Well, bud, you gotta understand that the Nazis—they’re just no good. You know about

the Nazis, don’t you?”

“Yup. We learned about them in school, they’re the Germans. And Hitler was their

president,” I say. Outside, clouds have filled the sky. It’s been raining a lot lately.

“Right, well you gotta understand that Hitler and the Nazis were just no good, they

arrested all the Jewish people—”

“And the Polish people and the Roma and the Geneva’s Witnesses—”
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“Right, of course, but mostly the Jews, and it was just no good at all.” We make a left

turn on Buford Street and reach a red light at the intersection where my father was beaten up.

Neither of us speak.

The silence is interrupted by a knock on the passenger window. I look out; a man stands

waiting by our car. His hair is long, it looks knotted.

I can’t see my father’s face, but he doesn’t turn his head. The light turns green and he

speeds forward, across the intersection.

“Who was that, did you know him?” I ask, craning my head back to see the man standing

in the street. “Why does he get to stand in the street? I thought the cops gotcha if you did that.”

“No, bud, he’s just a little lost.”

“Lost like how?”

“Just lost. Hey, did you grab your lunch? I set it out on the counter.”

“Yup, I got it right here,” I say, picking it up off the floor of our car and holding it up in

the air. “Right here, see?”

He drops me off at school and I don’t think of the man again, my mind focused on long

division and studies of genocide.

That day, there is an assembly. We are brought into the gym to sit on the floor and a

young woman in athletic clothes, like she ran here, comes and tells us about how children in

Africa are dying of leukemia and they need our help. All we have to do is bring in a few dollars

and we get fun prizes and the money will go to curing cancer.
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I sit next to a girl named Audrey, who has a breathing problem. All her exhales come out

raspy and forced. The teachers glance at Audrey every so often out of instinct, like any breath

could be the one where she can’t muster the strength to get rid of the air in her lungs.

To everyone’s joy, the woman brings out all the prizes. There are bouncy balls and

baseball bats; the woman juggles two of each at once and everyone goes crazy. She stops and

holds all the items into the air, and the room shakes with applause.

After the assembly, I ask Audrey if she’s getting money from her parents for the

assembly, and she says yes she is, and I say that I am too. That evening, I ask my father for ten

dollars, just enough to buy the bouncy ball. I tell him it’s for a good cause. I tell him the children

in Africa need my money to cure cancer.

“Oh, really?” he says. Tonight, he’s making pasta. Since we moved, he’s tried to learn

how to cook. He hasn’t been any good at it up to this point, my mother was a chef so he never

bothered. But now he rolls out dough and threads it through a pasta maker, creating long strips

that, if you squint your eyes and tilt your head, almost look like perfect fettuccini. “And how do

they plan on curing cancer?”

“I don’t know, but the lady that came and talked to us at the assembly on Tuesday told

us,” I meticulously explain, “that if we brought in money then they’d give it to Africa. And then

they’d use it to cure cancer!”

My father looks at me skeptically. “Bud, I don’t have a whole lot of money to spare right

now.” He scoops up the pasta into a pot.

“But—”
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He places the pot under the tap and lets it sit for several seconds. “I can give you ten

dollars, but that’s it.” I thank him profusely, and he tells me to go get his wallet. Soon after, we

eat slightly overdone pasta with parmesan and my father puts me to bed. That night I hear him on

the phone. His voice is shaky, worried again. Through the thin walls I hear him talk about

moving out of the state, that the police still won’t help him. Eventually he hangs up and I dream

of a grown man who begs for colorful bouncy balls on a street corner. I don’t remember if I gave

him any.

The next morning, my father drives me to school. It was closer to our old house, so we

have to wake up a bit earlier each morning to get to school on time. My father doesn’t seem to

mind.

As we drive, I triple check that I have the ten dollar bill in my folder. Each time it’s there,

but that doesn’t stop me from checking a fourth time. It’s raining as we drive. I watch raindrops

streak across the window, connecting to others and creating their own path of water across the

glass. We stop at the Buford and Park intersection once again, where my father was beaten up. I

think about that day.

“Hey dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember when you got beaten up here last year?” I ask, pointing to the

sidewalk right in front of the gas station. We’d been getting gas when it happened. Several men

came up and pushed my father, demanding he give them money.

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My father adjusts how he’s sitting. His back is straight. “Yes, of course I do.” His arm is

still healing, he gets his cast off in just a few days.

“Why didn’t those men go to jail?” I ask.

“Sometimes things aren’t quite so simple, bud. There was some other stuff going on.”

“What other stuff?”

My father looks back through the rear-view window. “Just—other stuff.”

“Why’d they want your money?”

The light turned green. My father presses the gas a little too hard and we jerk forward. “It

doesn’t really matter, but I owed them some money I’d borrowed.”

“Why?”

“Well, your mom, she was the one who brought home most of our money. When she—I

just couldn’t pay for our house and the stuff that makes our life nice without that money.” He

shifted in his seat. I copied him, shifting in my own.

“Is that why we moved?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“And why we have to drive longer to get to school?”

“Yes.” We stop at another red light. My father sighs. The rain continues to fall.

“Are they gonna come back for us?”

My father glances back at me through the rear-view mirror. “You’ll be fine, bud. You

don’t need to worry about anything.”

“But you’re worried, I hear you up on the phone at night.”

The car is silent for several seconds. “Don’t worry about that, Nathan.”
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“But why didn’t the guys go to jail?”

“The court found them innocent.” This confuses me, that’s not how it works.

“But I thought—”

“Look, bud, things aren’t always so simple.”

“It’s just like you said, with the Nazis! Those guys were no good.” He makes a right turn.

Then a left.

“It’s not like that, these men are completely different than the Nazis. The Nazis were

terrible, no good people. These men were just misguided. Lost.”

“Like the guy we saw yesterday? That knocked on the window?” I ask.

“No, that was also different. I’m sure he wasn’t a bad person.”

“Then why didn’t you help him get not-lost?”

“He wasn’t lost like that, he just needed money or something.”

“Then why didn’t you give him any?” I take out the ten dollars. “We could’ve given him

this.”

“I thought you needed it for the children in Africa? To cure cancer.”

“Well we could’ve given him different money.”

We reach my school and join the carline. It’s moving quickly this morning.

“Look, we can talk about it when you get home from school.”

“But if the man needed some money—”

“Nathan, I don’t want to argue with you about this. That’s it.” His voice is steady, but I

know to quiet down.

“I’m sorry.”
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“It’s fine, I—it’s just that life isn’t always black and white. You’ll understand when

you’re a little older.” I get out of the car and run up to the doors, ten dollar bill in hand.

That day, donations pour in faster than the rain. It’s pandemonium at recess, where we get

a few minutes while the clouds have briefly cleared. The teachers keep watch on the sky while

kids fly massive blue kites and race on red scooters with yellow streaks that look like lightning. I

bounce my bouncy ball on the sidewalk but it seems outdated, nothing compared to what

everyone else has.

Audrey sits alone on the bench by the swings. She doesn’t have any toys. I sit next to her

with my lunch box.

“Hi Nate,” she says.

“Hi Audrey,” I say. “Didn’t you get money from your parents?”

“I did. But I didn’t really want any of the prizes.”

“Really? Then why’d you bring in the money?” I ask, mouth full.

“For the kids. In Africa.”

I turn to look at her. She lets out a shuddering exhale. I shift my attention to the

playground. The littlest kids have tricycles, pumping their little legs faster than I’d have thought

they could. A bunch of my classmates have the same baseball bats the woman juggled at the

assembly the other day. Several have remote control cars and zip-string helicopters, twirling in

the breeze. A couple are already stuck in some of the smaller trees and the kids are throwing

handfuls of mulch trying to get them down.

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“You don’t want any of those?”

“My dad says I’ll grow—” She starts to cough. “Sorry, my dad says I’ll grow out of them

in a couple days. I’ll get distracted with other things.”

“Grow out? Of all this?”

“I don’t think it looks all that fun. Don’t you think it’ll get boring in a couple days? No

one’s playing with the bouncy balls anymore, or those airplanes. And no one remembers why

they’re buying all of this, where the money’s going.”

“Oh, I see.”

And as the first kite becomes entangled in a tree, as the cord winds around the leaves and

the branches stick through the cloth, I begin to understand something. I can’t put my finger on it

but Audrey is breathing heavily next to me and all these kids are laughing and screaming. I put

my bouncy ball in my pocket.

Raindrops begin to fall, a sunny rain. Teachers pop up their umbrellas and rush kids

inside. Everyone drops their kites and baseball bats and tricycles and zip-string helicopters and

races for the cafeteria. I follow. No one wants to get wet.

I reach into my pocket for my bouncy ball and realize it must’ve fallen out when I was

running inside. I look at the ground around me, part of me hoping to catch a glimpse of its shiny

red surface but I guess it doesn’t really matter. Audrey was right, I was going to get bored of it in

a couple days anyway. All the kids around me watch forlornly out the windows as their electric

cars get wet, as mud stains their kites. They don’t care about curing cancer. I don’t know if I

even care about curing cancer. Or I suppose I do but it seems so far away, not right here enough.

That day my father picks me up and he asks me if I have the bouncy ball. I tell him I lost it in the
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rain. It occurs to me that things would be much easier if the rainfall would just wash them all

away, leave all troubles stranded in puddles littered across the sidewalk. I think my father is

saying something stern about wasting money, but I find myself distracted by the raindrops

flowing across my window, combining and multiplying.

The next day is Saturday and my father takes me to his doctor’s appointment. He’s

getting his cast off. We wait in the doctor’s office for nearly a half hour before the receptionist

invites us into the back, and we go into a small room where he invites my father to sit on one of

those big hospital beds. The doctor enters with a spinning blade, he tells me it’s his special cast

cutting saw. It’ll take the cast right off and then your dad’s arm will be back to normal again. He

has a big smile plastered to his face, and he maintains it the whole time as he saws through the

cast. I flinch as it drills through, it almost looks like it’s going to cut his arm the whole way off

but then the cast falls to the floor and my father’s arm is free. I expect it to be tan and full of

flesh and look like it could lift me up into the air like he used to, but it’s pale and all wrinkled up,

like a pinky toe after a long bath. My father winces when he sees it. A long scar runs down the

forearm, a straight, surgical line. The doctor shows him how to stretch out his fingers again, how

to take each one and bend it just slightly back, and then how to turn his wrist around in its socket.

He says it’ll get more tan as time passes, that the skin will stretch back out and it’ll look

completely normal in a day or two. He says That was quite a beating you took, Mr. Green, and

my father nods. It was. Once again I’m thinking about the men who beat my father up, how they

showed no regret as they beat in his bones and laughed as he bled. How their only drive was the

money my father owed them and how far they were willing to go to get it. I don’t quite
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understand it but as my father examines his un-casted arm I begin to wonder why people want so

much, why they are so greedy. For money or power or even brightly colored toys. On the way

out, I see a jar of lollipops and I ask the receptionist for a yellow one and he gives it to me. My

father reminds me to say thank you so I say thank you and I finish the lollipop in just a couple

bites. The taste of artificial lemon lingers on my tongue for at least another hour. I find it sour.