Summer Rain

SUMMER RAIN

By Ekona Del Rey Monroe

The party had already started to turn soft around the edges when they left.

It was the last Saturday in July, 1976, and the air over the county fairgrounds still held the day’s heat like a held breath. Someone had strung Christmas lights between the trees even though it was summer. The lights looked tired. A cooler of beer sat open in the bed of a pickup. The radio in somebody’s Trans Am was playing something with too much saxophone. Girls in cut-offs and boys in faded band shirts moved in slow orbits around the cars parked in the grass.

Lila’s brother’s Camaro sat a little apart from the others, dark blue and already collecting a fine layer of dust on the hood. Someone had joked earlier that the car had killed somebody before. Lila’s brother had only shrugged and said he didn’t like driving it at night when he was drunk. He never explained why. There was an old stain on the back seat no one could quite place. darker than spilled Coke, older than any of them wanted to think about. The radio had been broken for months. It clicked and hissed and did nothing else.

Lila spun the keys once around her finger.

“Come on. It’s getting boring. We’ll just drive out to the reservoir and come back.”

Denise was sitting on the hood of a different car, bare feet dangling, a cigarette burning down between her fingers. She looked at Lila for a long second, then shrugged.

Cindy was already standing. She always stood when Lila decided something. Marcie was the last. She had been talking to a boy from the next town and didn’t want to leave, but when the other three started walking she followed, still laughing at something the boy had said.

They piled in the way they always did. Lila behind the wheel. Denise in the passenger seat with her feet on the dash. Cindy and Marcie in the back, shoulders touching, the windows already rolled down because the car held heat like a closed hand. Marcie’s bare thigh rested against the old stain. She shifted once, then let it be.

None of them mentioned the fifth girl from two summers ago. The one they had left at a different party when the night turned ugly and they decided it was easier to go without her. They had told themselves she would find another ride. She never came to school again. No one asked too many questions. The four of them had simply stopped saying her name.

Lila turned the key. The engine came alive with its usual low, satisfied sound. She reversed through the grass, found the dirt track that led out to the two-lane, and pulled onto the blacktop.

For the first three miles nothing was wrong.

Then the doors locked.

It was a small sound. Four soft clicks, almost polite. Lila glanced down, frowning, and tried the lock button with her thumb. Nothing. She tried the handle. The door stayed shut. Denise tried hers. Same result. In the back, Cindy laughed once, short and uncertain.

“Very funny, Lila.”

“I’m not doing it.”

Lila pulled the lock up with her fingers. It rose half an inch and then sank again, firm. She tried the window crank. The glass would not move. Denise was already turned around in her seat, testing the back doors. Marcie had both hands on the handle and was pulling hard enough that the tendons stood out in her wrists.

The car accelerated.

Not hard. Just enough that the trees began to blur. Lila’s foot was not on the gas. She stared at her bare toes on the floor mat as if they belonged to someone else. The speedometer needle climbed past forty, past fifty. The steering wheel resisted when she tried to turn it. The car held the center of the lane with a steadiness that felt like intention.

“Stop,” Denise said. Her voice was still calm. “Lila, stop the car.”

“I can’t.”

Cindy’s laugh had disappeared. She was leaning forward between the seats now, one hand on Lila’s shoulder.

“This isn’t funny anymore.”

The radio came on by itself.

Static first, then the soft, clear opening notes of a song none of them had heard in years. Skeeter Davis. “The End of the World.” The volume rose until it filled the car. Lila reached for the dial. The knob turned under her fingers but the song did not change and the volume did not drop.

The radio was not supposed to work.

Why does the sun go on shining? 

Why does the sea rush to shore?

They were doing seventy when the car left the two-lane and took a farm road without slowing. Dust rose behind them in a long pale banner. The first house appeared on the left, a low white place with a porch light on. The Camaro turned into the driveway as if it had been expected. It stopped ten feet from the front steps. The engine idled.

A man came out wiping his hands on a dish towel. He was still smiling when the car surged forward and took him against the porch rail. The sound was brief and wet. The car reversed, tires biting gravel, and swung back onto the road. In the rear window the porch light kept shining on something that no longer moved.

No one spoke for a long time.

Cindy was the first to make a sound. A small, high noise in her throat, like a hinge that needed oil. Marcie had both arms around her. Denise had one hand over her own mouth. Lila was staring straight ahead, both hands locked on the wheel even though the wheel was not listening.

The song played all the way through and then started again.

They tried everything in the first hour. Shoulder against doors. Feet against windows. Screaming until their voices broke. Lila slammed her forehead against the steering wheel hard enough to leave a red mark. Denise used the metal tongue of her belt buckle to dig at the rubber seal around the glass until her fingers bled. In the back, Marcie and Cindy pulled at the rear seat as if they could tear through into the trunk. Nothing gave.

The car killed three more times before midnight.

A couple walking home from a bar. An old man checking his mailbox. A dog that ran out barking and then did not get up again.

The old man was the one who saw.

He straightened from the mailbox with a handful of envelopes and looked directly through the windshield. Not at Lila. At the empty space beside her, the driver’s seat that should have held nothing. His face changed. Soft recognition, almost relief.

“Oh,” he said, voice carrying clearly through the glass. “It’s that song again.”

Then the car took him.

Each time the Camaro slowed, chose, and continued. The girls watched because there was nowhere else to look. The song kept returning, sometimes after long silences, sometimes so soon after the last chorus that it felt like mockery.

Somewhere after the third killing the police found them.

Blue lights bloomed in the rear window. A siren started and then cut off, as if the officer had decided the sound was unnecessary. The Camaro did not speed up. It simply refused to pull over. When the first shot came it punched through the rear windshield and exited the front without touching anyone. The second shot grazed Lila’s left shoulder, a hot bright line that made her cry out and clap her hand over the place. Blood ran warm between her fingers and soaked the white cotton of her crop top.

The third shot found Cindy.

It entered low on the left side of her abdomen and did not come out. The sound she made was not a scream. It was smaller than that, surprised, almost polite. Then the pain arrived and she folded forward into Marcie’s lap with both hands pressed hard against the dark spreading place on her shirt.

After that the police fell back. Maybe they understood something about the car. Maybe they simply ran out of road they were willing to die on. The blue lights dwindled and disappeared. The Camaro kept driving.

Cindy’s blood was very warm at first.

Marcie held her with both arms and both legs, as if she could keep the life from leaving by force of will. She pressed her hands over Cindy’s hands over the wound. The blood came anyway, slow and steady, turning Marcie’s denim shorts black and sticky. Cindy’s face had gone the color of the underside of a leaf. She kept saying the same two words.

“Mom. Mom.”

Sometimes her eyes focused on Marcie’s face. Sometimes they looked past her at the roof of the car. Denise had turned all the way around in the passenger seat and was holding Cindy’s ankle, the only part she could reach. Lila drove with one hand and kept the other clamped over her own shoulder. The graze had already soaked through the wadded shirt Denise had given her.

The song came back.

Cindy cried while it played. Not loud. Just a continuous soft leaking of sound that mixed with Skeeter Davis until the two became hard to separate. Marcie pressed her mouth to Cindy’s hair and told her things that were not true. That it was going to be all right. That they were almost somewhere. That the bleeding was slowing. The bleeding was not slowing.

An hour passed. Then another.

Cindy started to talk in fragments. She told Marcie about the boy at the party she had almost kissed and then hadn’t. She told her about the time in eighth grade when she stole a bottle of her mother’s perfume and wore it to school every day until it was gone. She asked if her mother would be angry about the blood on the new shirt. Marcie answered every question as if the answers mattered.

Denise was the one who finally said the thing none of them wanted to hear.

“She’s not going to make it.”

Lila’s voice came from the front, flat and strange. “Don’t.”

“I’m not being cruel. I’m looking at her. She’s cold. Her lips are the wrong color. We need to say the true things while she can still hear them.”

So they did.

Lila told Cindy she was sorry for every time she had made her feel like the extra girl, the one who was invited because it would have been rude not to. Denise told her about the night last winter when she had almost called Cindy from a payphone because she was scared of how quiet her own house had become. Marcie did not say much. She only kept her arms tight and her mouth against Cindy’s hair and rocked her the smallest amount, the way you rock something you cannot bear to put down.

Somewhere in the long middle of the night, between one chorus and the next, Cindy’s eyes found Marcie’s and stayed there.

“We left her,” she whispered. “We just left her.”

Marcie already knew who she meant. They all did. The fifth girl. The one whose name they had stopped saying. Cindy’s voice was almost gone, but the words were clear enough.

“Do you think that’s why?”

No one answered. The car simply kept moving through the dark.

Cindy died just as the sky was beginning to lighten in the east.

There was no big moment. Her breathing simply got further apart until the next one did not arrive. Marcie felt the exact second the weight in her arms changed. She made a sound that had no name and kept holding on. Denise covered her face with both hands. Lila stared at the road and did not blink for a long time.

They left Cindy’s body in Marcie’s lap because there was nowhere else to put it.

The car continued. Fields. A closed gas station. A stretch of road where the trees met overhead and the light turned green and underwater. The song played twice more. No one tried to turn it off anymore.

Three hours after Cindy died, Marcie went quiet.

Denise noticed first. She had been watching the back seat in the rearview mirror the way you watch a pot you are afraid will boil over. Marcie’s face had gone very still. Her eyes were open but not focused on anything inside the car. One of her hands was moving in her lap, small precise motions. Denise thought she was picking at the dried blood.

She was not.

The nail clipper was the kind that came with a little folding blade, the sort of thing girls kept in the bottom of a purse for emergencies that never quite arrived. Marcie had opened the blade. She did not look at anyone. She simply turned her left wrist up and drew the edge across the soft blue place where the veins lived. The blood came brighter than Cindy’s. It ran down her arm and into the already soaked seat and kept coming.

Denise screamed her name.

Marcie did not look up. She made a second cut, deeper, and then leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. By the time Lila understood what was happening and twisted around, Marcie’s face had already begun to empty. She died more quietly than Cindy. Almost politely. The last thing she did was turn her face toward Cindy’s body, as if checking that she was still there.

Denise climbed into the back.

There was almost no room. She ended up half on top of both of them, shaking Marcie’s shoulders, saying her name over and over until the word lost its meaning. Lila kept driving with one hand and reaching back with the other, fingers brushing Denise’s bare foot, the only contact she could manage. The blood from Marcie’s wrist soaked into Denise’s clothes until she could feel it cooling against her stomach.

When Denise finally stopped shaking the body, the sun was fully up.

Only the two of them were left.

They did not speak for a long time. The car had found a road that ran along the edge of the old quarry lake. The water was the color of wet slate. On the far side the land rose into a low red-rock bluff. The Camaro seemed to know the way.

Denise crawled back into the front seat eventually. She left the two bodies arranged as carefully as she could, Marcie’s head still turned toward Cindy. She sat with her knees drawn up and her arms around them and stared at the glove box because looking anywhere else required more courage than she had left.

Lila’s voice was almost gone from screaming earlier. What remained was rough and small.

“I keep thinking if I say the right thing the doors will unlock.”

Denise shook her head once.

“There isn’t a right thing.”

They told each other the leftover truths anyway, because the silence had become another kind of door that needed opening. Lila admitted she had known the party would turn bad and had wanted to leave with them specifically so she would not have to watch it happen alone. Denise admitted she had been in love with Marcie for two years and had never said it because the timing was always wrong and now the timing would be wrong forever. They talked about their mothers. They talked about the first time each of them had realized they could die. They talked about the girl they had left behind, the way the night had swallowed her, the way none of them had gone back to look. They talked until the words ran out and then they simply sat with their shoulders touching while the car climbed the graded dirt road that led up the side of the bluff.

The sky had been clear all night. Now, as the Camaro reached the higher ground, the first drops hit the windshield.

Rain.

The first rain of the summer.

It came soft at first, then steadier, streaking the glass, mixing with the dust and the old blood that still clung to the side windows. The smell of wet asphalt and wet earth rose around them. Lila watched the wipers stay still. The car did not need them.

The song came on one last time.

Why does my heart go on beating? 

Why do these eyes of mine cry?

The Camaro reached the top of the bluff and did not slow. The drop to the lake was nearly eighty feet. For a moment the car seemed to hang in the bright morning air, weightless, the same way a held breath is weightless. Then the nose dipped and the world tilted and the water came up to meet them with a sound like a door finally closing.

The radio kept playing all the way down.

After the surface closed over the roof, the song continued for a few more seconds, muffled and strange, as if the lake itself were listening. Then there was only the soft ticking of metal cooling in deep water, and the long green silence that follows any summer that has outlived the people who were trying to survive it.

By noon it was raining over the whole county for the first time in three weeks.

-

In August of 1996, after a drought lowered the quarry lake by nearly thirty feet, people expected to see the wreckage. Divers went down looking for it. Local newspapers ran the old photographs of the four girls. Someone still left flowers on the bluff every July.

They found nothing.

The Camaro had never been there.

The End