Change of Climate

Untitled Part 11

Rafferty's mother had chosen the house on the hill because it allowed them to see for miles in all directions. And what they saw for miles in all directions was mostly nothing, hazy green and brown drifting off to a white-blue sky, usually. Sometimes, understandably, the weather grew messy and turbulent, but Rafferty's mother had been good at control.

Rafferty was less good at control.

Rafferty sat on her front porch and looked all around her and breathed slow and deep, because the tiniest flinch on her part could be enough to cause a disturbance in the air that might turn into a tornado hundreds of miles away. You never knew. She never knew. It was why she had desperately needed her mother to teach her. Instead her mother had left her and now Rafferty was at a complete loss as to what to do.

She could still feel the hurricane off-shore, and she knew it would be building stronger and stronger, winding itself tighter and tighter. Her mother and her grandfather would have cut back on that, would have cooled the ocean, would have nudged at its path, they were good at that. Instead Rafferty felt powerless, the hurricane buffeting itself over her instead of the other way around. She was losing control over all of it, she knew. She had never really had control to start with. And now she refused to turn the news on because there was constant talk of the unseasonably hot autumn up north, the unseasonably cool summer down south, the enduring droughts out west. Rafferty couldn't handle any of it.

She heard Bayless's pick-up truck rumble up the back drive and sighed. It was so difficult to get away. With the sigh, she watched a couple of thunderclouds build up on the far horizon, and she repressed the urge to sigh again, which would only make it worse.

"Hey," said Bayless, coming around the side of the house. "I thought I'd find you here."

"It's where I always am, isn't it?" she asked, a little sourly, and wondered why she was constantly rude to Bayless. His family had taken her in when her mother had disappeared. And then she had taken out her anger toward her mother on Bayless's family. It wasn't fair, it just was.

Much like the rest of Rafferty's life.

Bayless, as usual, didn't rise to the bait of her rudeness. He just leaned on the porch and said, lazily, "Want a ride back down the hill?"

Rafferty looked at the position of the sun, setting now. She didn't want to stay up here and watch the thunderstorm she'd spawned play out over the countryside, and it was almost time for dinner anyway. "Sure," she said, and uncurled herself from her perch on the swing.

Bayless waited until they were halfway down the hill before he spoke. "Maybe it doesn't do you any good," he said, slowly, "going up there all the time."

"It's the only thing that makes me feel close to my mother," Rafferty said, truthfully, sticking her hand out the window to catch some leaves as they passed by them on the bumpy dirt road down the mountain.

There was a very pregnant pause before Bayless said, "Right. But do you want to—"

"Don't you dare," Rafferty cut in, her voice low. "She's my mother."

"She left you," Bayless pointed out, suddenly ruthless. "She left you."

"She's still my mother—"

"She left you and we took care of you and you've never once given us any credit for that. Never once. Instead you spend every minute you can up at that house missing someone who didn't even care about you."

"Don't you dare say that!" Rafferty exclaimed, blinking back sudden tears. "She did care about me!"

Overhead, thunder rumbled, low and ominous, and Rafferty swiped at her tears. They were mirrored by a few lone raindrops on Bayless's windshield.

Bayless swore under his breath and rolled up his window. "Put your window up, Raff," he said.

"She would have stayed if she could have stayed," Rafferty insisted, ignoring him. "I know she would have. She just...couldn't. Something kept her from...She just couldn't stay. But she would've if she could've because she loved me a lot."

"Rafferty," said Bayless. "You're getting soaked."

And she was. She hadn't realized it. The wind was blowing raindrops furiously through her open window. She rolled it up quickly, shivering now as the air conditioning Bayless had turned on hit her drenched skin. And she cursed Bayless for getting under her skin, for saying anything at all, for being, possibly, right.

Bayless wordlessly turned the air conditioning off and just drove, until he parked in the driveway of the house and turned to her.

"Never mind," Rafferty said, shaking her head against her chattering teeth.

"No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I said that. I didn't mean to—I'm sorry. She makes you sad, and that makes me mad, but I shouldn't have said anything like that. I was way out of line."

"No, you're right." Rafferty pushed her sopping curls off of her forehead. "She did leave me." With her waning anger, the storm was subsiding, the rain tapering off, the sun weakly breaking through. Rafferty looked at it glumly.

"Come on," Bayless said. "We'll go inside and you can change."

Rafferty followed Bayless inside and Bayless's mother said, "Raff, honey, did you get caught in the storm?"

"Yeah," Rafferty said, because it was easier than explaining that she just had failed to put the window up to protect herself.

"It did come out of nowhere, didn't it?" she said, sympathetically, clucking her tongue.

"Yeah," Rafferty agreed, heading toward her room. "Totally out of nowhere."