Rain and Revelation Read Online Free Page A

over. Entwining his fingers in my long hair, he kisses my neck and whispers, “I missed you.”
    I push him away, and he looks at me like I slapped him. I pull my sweater up to cover the hickeys from last night.
    “That’s a fine thanks for driving all the way over here to get you.”
    Mikey stares ahead, his face twisted in a scowl. He won’t look at me. I know he’s waiting for me to apologize. Sinking into the seat, I close my eyes. In a voice that sounds small and unlike my own, I say, “Ma tried to kill herself today. I just want to go home, okay?”
    “Oh, God!” He tries to touch me, but I move closer to the door and look into the dark sky. When I tell him my car is at Doc McCullough’s, he looks at me like I’ve just told him a dog had kittens. I simply rest my head on the seat and stare ahead.
    Mikey puts the car in drive and takes off. My shoulder slams the passenger door when he whips the car around toward Louisburgh. An empty beer bottle rolls out from under the seat and hits my foot. I kick it aside, and we drive in silence.
    When we get to the vet clinic, my car is the only one in the lot, and everything is dark except for the lit sign that caught my attention earlier.
    Mikey kisses my cheek. “See you tonight?”
    I shake my head. I say nothing even though there’s much to say. I notice lines around his eyes. I can’t remember when I looked closely at my own face. Maybe I have lines, too, at twenty.
    The car’s headlights reveal scattered puddles, which I step over to get to my car. I hear the tires squeal as Mikey accelerates toward Louisburgh. Inside the car, I check my phone to see if Fiona has called or texted me, but she hasn’t.
    Driving home, I look for sheep but see only Ma’s face as she lay in the tub and then covered with the oxygen mask in the ambulance. I force myself to stare ahead at the dark road. I can’t recall a time I returned home and Ma wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table or in the rocker with a cup of tea. I wonder what she’s doing now, who’s with her, and why she refused to see me.
    When I get home, the front door is still open. I flip the wall switch and see the floor covered in rainwater. Slamming the door, I go and turn on every light in the living room and kitchen. Snatching towels from the hall closet, I toss them on the floor to soak up the water. The heavy drapes covering the windows remain closed.
    My eyes fall on the painting of the Virgin Mary hanging on the wall in the living room. I never noticed how sad her eyes looked holding the baby Jesus. Cold seeps into my body.
    I turn up the electric heat, but don’t bother going outside to get more peat turves from the stack in back of the cottage. Instead, I walk around the overstuffed couch and the hand-carved rocker, into the kitchen and around the wood-planked table with the four straight-backed chairs, and back again.
    As I walk around the cottage, I glance at the framed pictures on the fireplace mantel, on the end tables, and on the bookshelves on the far wall. They are all of me: an infant in my long christening gown with bright red hair sticking straight up; seven years old in my first communion dress with hair curly from being set in pink foam rollers; twelve years old in the knit jumper outfit Ma made for me with straight hair the color of chestnuts; and many more of me and Fiona, my best friend, as fairies, as princesses, and in our various dresses for the formal school dances. Da and Ma aren’t in the pictures with me. There are no pictures of them together.
    I walk the room as through a labyrinth. Everything looks the same, but different.
    Something small on the window ledge, above the stainless steel kitchen sink, catches my attention. It’s Ma’s wedding ring: a Claddagh ring, two hands holding a crowned heart.
    I slip the ring on my pinkie and stare at it. Ma never took her wedding ring off.
    My phone buzzes, cutting the silence.
    Fiona texts that she wants to meet up at the pub. I presume