Petrichor (1)

[Dedicated to Shirley, who lost her husband last year.]

 

The tomato seedlings were dying and Nadine couldn't figure out why.

She stood at the kitchen window in the grey morning light, watering can in hand, studying the thin stems that bowed under their own weight. Six tomato plants, two bell peppers, a pot of basil that had gone yellow at the edges. She'd bought them three weeks ago from the garden center on Highway 64, the first seedlings she'd purchased since David died. His project, always. Every spring for twenty-three years—tomatoes, peppers, herbs he'd never use because he didn't cook but grew anyway because his father had grown them and his father before that. She'd watched him work from the kitchen window, brought him lemonade in the tall glasses they'd gotten as wedding gifts, never helped.

"Come help me," he'd say.

"I'll burn."

"So burn. It's worth it."

She never did. She watched. She remembered the particular red of his shoulders where the sun caught him, the smell of aloe vera she'd rub on him later, warm skin and something underneath that was just him in summer. The way he'd look up at her, squinting, sweat running down his temples, and smile like she was the best thing he'd ever seen. She reached for that memory now, the way she reached for it every morning. It was the realest thing she had left of him—more real than the photos on the mantel, more real than his clothes still hanging in the closet, more real than the chipped coffee mug on the second shelf that she couldn't bring herself to move.

This year she'd decided to try.

"Just a few more days," she told the seedlings. Her voice sounded strange in the empty kitchen. The refrigerator hummed its same three notes—had always hummed them, she realized, but she'd stopped hearing it years ago. The faucet dripped its same slow rhythm, one drop every four seconds, into the stainless steel sink that David had installed himself the summer before he died. "The sun will come."

She checked her phone. The forecast showed rain through Friday. Rain through Saturday. Rain through the following week. The grey strip of icons stretched toward a horizon she couldn't see, and she wondered—not for the first time—if there was a glitch in the system, some error that kept copying the same day forward.

She took two ibuprofen from the bottle by the sink, swallowing them dry. The headache was nothing—a dull pressure behind her eyes she'd carried so long she barely noticed it anymore. Just part of being Nadine. Part of being forty-seven. Part of waking up alone in a house that used to hold two people.

Outside, water streamed down the glass. She could hear it on the roof, that constant white noise she'd lived with for weeks. She could smell it—that particular scent of rain on hot asphalt, rain on earth, rain on everything. There was a word for that smell. Started with P. Petri-something. A scientific word she'd known once, back when David was alive and they'd sit on the porch together waiting for summer storms. She could almost taste it on her tongue, the shape of the word, but it wouldn't come.

She grabbed her keys and drove to work. The wipers beat their rhythm against the windshield. Drops spattered against the glass, against her window when she cracked it for air. The world outside was grey and wet and had been for so long she'd stopped expecting anything else.

---

The insurance office was quiet. Nadine hung her damp jacket on the back of her chair and settled into spreadsheets, phone calls, other people's claims. Patty was at the next desk, typing with the steady rhythm of someone who'd been doing the same job for fifteen years. Doug was in the back. Maria was on the phone, her voice a low murmur about deductibles.

"Lord, I'm tired of this rain," Nadine said. "How long has it been now?"

Patty's fingers paused. She looked up, and something in her expression made Nadine's stomach clench.

"What rain?"

"The—" Nadine pointed at the window. Water was streaming down the glass in rivulets, catching the grey light and bending it. The sound was constant, that white noise that had followed her from home, from the car, from everywhere. "That rain. Right there. It's been weeks."

Patty turned to look. Her face didn't change. No recognition, no confirmation, no oh right, the rain, god isn't it awful.

"I don't see anything, Nadine. Just grey. Same as always."

"But you can hear it." Nadine heard the edge in her own voice. "The sound. On the roof. On the window."

"I don't hear anything."

Nadine stood. Walked to the window. She could feel the cold seeping through the glass, could see the drops tracing their paths down the pane. She pressed her finger to the glass, following a drop. "Right there. And there. And—"

"Nadine." Patty was beside her now, close enough that Nadine could smell her perfume—the same floral scent she'd worn every day for fifteen years, never varying, as unchanging as the grey outside. "Are you feeling okay?"

"I'm fine. I just—"

But Patty was already walking away, settling back at her desk, her fingers finding the keyboard. As if nothing had happened. As if Nadine hadn't just pointed at something real and been told it didn't exist.

She watched Doug cross the office, coffee mug in hand. He stepped carefully around an empty space near the filing cabinet. A wide step, deliberate. Then Maria hung up the phone and halfway through turning to say something to Patty, she stopped. Tilted her head slightly to the left. Nodded once, briefly, at nothing. Then continued as if nothing had interrupted her.

Nadine went back to her desk. Her pen had rolled across the surface while she was gone, coming to rest against the window.

Patty noticed her looking at it. "It wanted to be closer to the window," she said, already back to typing.

Nadine's hands went cold. The cold spread up her arms and settled behind her ribs, and she sat at her desk staring at the pen until her eyes burned.

---

Trisha came that evening, after Nadine called three times in an hour. She stood in the living room of her childhood home, still wearing her dental hygienist scrubs with the little tooth pattern on the pocket, and her face had that careful look. Daughter-managing-mother careful. Nadine had seen that look on other people's children. Never expected to see it aimed at her.

"Mom, sit down. Please."

"I don't want to sit down."

"Mom."

Nadine sat. Her hands found each other, fingers lacing tight. The rain drummed on the roof, on the windows, on the world outside that apparently only she could see.

"I need to tell you something," Trisha said. She sat on the edge of the coffee table, close enough to touch but not touching. "Something Dad and I decided not to tell you. We thought—we hoped—it would resolve on its own."

"What would resolve?"

"There's a condition." Trisha's voice was gentle, practiced. A voice for nervous children in the dental chair. "Most people correct when they're young. Their brains stop generating certain... images. Sounds. They start seeing what's really there."

"You're saying I hallucinate."

"I'm saying Dad did too." Trisha's hand covered Nadine's—warm, solid, denser than it should be, like there was more of her daughter than there used to be. "He saw the same things you see. The rain. The sun. The colors. After he died, we thought you might finally..."

She didn't finish the sentence.

"What happens if I don't?"

Something shifted in Trisha's eyes. A depth Nadine had never noticed. Not darkness—fullness. Like something was looking out through her daughter's face, something patient and vast.

"You will, Mom. Everyone does eventually." Trisha's voice was soft. Patient. "And then you'll see what we see. What's really here."

Nadine pulled her hand away. Walked to the window where the rain was still falling, had always been falling. "I'm not sick. The rain is real."

Trisha didn't argue. She stayed until midnight, made tea that Nadine didn't drink, and finally left with a hug that lasted too long.

That night, Nadine lay awake listening to the rain and wondering when her daughter had started looking at her like that. Like something fond examining a specimen. Like something patient waiting for a clock to wind down. The house made sounds she'd never noticed before—settling sounds, creaking sounds, the particular groan of old wood in the walls. She'd lived here for twenty-three years and never heard the house breathe like this. David had heard it. He must have. They'd shared everything else—the rain, the sun, the light. They'd shared a whole world that no one else could see.

Now she was the last one. The only one still seeing it. The only one still holding on.

She lay in the dark and listened to the rain and the house and the silence underneath, and she didn't sleep until almost dawn.

---

The photo albums were in the hall closet, the same place they'd been for thirty years. Nadine pulled them out one by one, spreading them across the living room floor.

Her childhood birthdays: grey sky in every frame. Third birthday, blowing out candles in the backyard—grey. Seventh birthday, the pool party she'd begged for all summer—grey sky, grey water, pale skin that had never seen sun.

Graduation, 1995: she remembered June heat, fanning herself with the program while the superintendent droned on. In the photograph, the sky was flat and dim. Her father's arm around her shoulder, both of them pale under colorless light. No squinting. No sweat stains.

The family vacation to Myrtle Beach, 1987. She'd packed three different swimsuits. She'd burned so badly the first day that her mother made her wear a t-shirt in the water. She remembered the tight heat of damaged skin, the smell of aloe vera every night, her father laughing and calling her a lobster.

In the photo, her shoulders were pale. The ocean was grey. Everything was grey.

She found the wedding album last.

June 15th, 1997. The outdoor ceremony at the botanical garden, chosen because of how the light would fall through the trees in the afternoon. She remembered squinting during the vows. Remembered sweat trickling down her back under the dress. Remembered the photographer saying turn just a little to your left, the light is perfect.

Grey sky in every frame. No one squinting. David's face, younger and thinner, smiling at her under flat light that cast no shadows.

Except—

One photo. Near the end of the album. Her and David under the trellis, his hands in hers, the moment after they'd been pronounced. In the corner, half-covered by her thumb: a sliver of sky.

She stared at it until her eyes burned. Blue. It was blue. It had to be—

She couldn't remember what she was looking for.

She held the photograph and tried to recall why it mattered. There was something in the corner. Something important. Her thumb covered part of it. She moved her thumb.

Grey. The sky was grey.

Had it always been grey?

She went to bed with the photograph on her nightstand, and in the morning she couldn't remember why she'd put it there.

---

The library was quiet. Nadine sat at a computer terminal in the back, searching.

Perceptual disorder weather: nothing.

Seeing rain hallucination: articles about depression, about metaphor, about nothing useful.

She was about to leave when she heard it. An old man in the corner of the reading room, hunched over a book he wasn't really reading. Muttering to himself. And one word cut through:

"Rain."

She was beside him before she knew she'd moved. "You see it too?"

He looked up. His eyes had that depth—the fullness everyone seemed to have now, everyone except her. But his expression was kind. The face of a man who remembered something painful.

"I used to," he said. His voice was soft, worn smooth by years. "Long time ago."

"What happened?"

He didn't answer right away. His gaze drifted to the window, tracking something Nadine couldn't see. His head tilted slightly. A small nod, almost involuntary. Then he looked back at her, and for a moment he seemed to have forgotten she was there.

"I was tired," he said finally. His hands rested on the table, perfectly still. Not trembling. Not tense. Just still, the way hands are still when they've finally stopped reaching for something. "So tired. You don't know how tired until..."

He trailed off. Looked at the window again. Something was moving out there, something in the grey. He watched it pass with the patience of a man watching clouds.

"Until what?"

But he was nodding at something outside. When he turned back, his eyes were gentle.

"It gets easier," he said. "It gets easier."

Nadine left the library with her hands shaking. Her chest felt packed with wet sand—something heavy and wrong lodged behind her ribs.

Because he wasn't lying. She could see it in his stillness. He'd found something she hadn't.

Part of her wanted to find it too.

Part of her was so tired of fighting.

She spent the next two days avoiding the window. Avoiding the grey. She went to work, came home, watched television she didn't see. She kept hearing the old man's voice: It gets easier. She kept seeing his hands, perfectly still on the table. She kept wondering what it would feel like to stop.

---

She woke on the fifth day and the rain was loud.

Louder than it had been in weeks. She lay in bed listening—every drop distinct, every patter and splash and rush of water in the gutters. She could feel the storm's weight pressing on the house.

At the window, the grey seemed thinner. She pressed her hand to the cold glass and looked up, straining to see past the clouds, and at the edges she saw—

Blue.

Just a flicker. A crack in the overcast where something brighter showed through.

She laughed. The sound startled her—she couldn't remember the last time she'd laughed, not since David, not since before. She pressed both hands to the glass, tears running down her face while the rain ran down the window, and something that had been clenched behind her ribs finally let go.

She wasn't sick. The sun was still there, hidden but present. The rain was real, and someday it would stop, and everything would be the way it was supposed to be.

She called in sick to work—the first time in three years—and spent the morning on the porch watching the rain and crying and laughing and feeling more alive than she had since David's funeral. The blue was still there at the edges of the clouds. Faint, but there. Proof that she wasn't crazy. Proof that the world she remembered was real.

In the afternoon, she went to work anyway, unable to stay home, unable to stop smiling. The weight in her chest had lifted. The headache was still there but fainter, barely a whisper. Doug still stepped around empty spaces. Maria still nodded at nothing. But that was their problem, not hers. She was the one who could see clearly. She was the one holding on.

That afternoon, she planted one seedling—the strongest tomato—in a pot on the front porch. The rain soaked her hair, ran down her face, dripped from her elbows while she worked the soil with her bare hands. The earth smelled dark and rich and alive.

"Hang on," she told it. "Just a little longer. The sun is coming."

---

The seedling was gone when she got home the next evening.

Not wilted. Not broken. The pot sat on the porch where she'd left it, but the soil was flat and grey, smooth as if nothing had ever grown there. The plant had dissolved.

She stood on the porch for a long time, rain soaking through her jacket, before she could make herself go inside.

The photograph was on her nightstand. She picked it up.

She looked at it for a long time. There was supposed to be something. Something in the corner. She couldn't remember what.

She put the photograph down.

She sat on the couch. David's shoulders. She reached for them—the red, the heat, the smell of aloe. Her hands opened and closed on her knees. The gesture felt familiar, like her body remembered reaching for something even though her mind had forgotten what.

She could describe warmth. She knew the words: heat, sun, burn, summer. But the feeling was gone. Like a word in a foreign language—she knew what it was supposed to mean but couldn't mean it. She remembered that she used to reach for this memory every morning, that it had been the realest thing she had left of David. Now it was just shapes. Just sounds.

She was dissolving. Piece by piece, like the seedling. Her world was erasing itself, and she couldn't stop it, couldn't even slow it down.

She called Trisha. Got voicemail. Hung up.

She went to bed without dinner. The headache was barely there now—just a faint pressure she could almost ignore. She lay in the dark, and the fighting felt very far away, and very heavy, and she wondered why she was still doing it.

 

(Cont.)