Petrichor (2)

(Cont.)

 

She woke to silence.

The rain had stopped. Not paused, not lightened—stopped. The white noise she'd lived with her entire life was gone.

Nadine lay in the dark, counting seconds. Counting minutes.

Nothing.

She got out of bed. The floor was different under her feet—not colder, but denser. Like the air had weight. Like she was moving through something that had always been there.

She walked to the living room window.

The grey outside was no longer flat. It was alive—not with movement, but with presence. Something vast was there. Had always been there. The rain had been blocking her perception of it all these years, all her life.

The room grew heavier. Temperature dropping, though the thermostat hadn't changed. A hum rose at the edge of her hearing—low, almost subsonic, the kind of sound you feel in your teeth before you hear it with your ears. The curtain by the window shifted. No breeze. No open window. Just movement, displacement, as if something had passed close enough to push the air aside.

She felt it acknowledge her.

Not the way a person acknowledges another person. The way gravity acknowledges a stone. Something fond the way a glacier is fond of the valley it carves—patient, inevitable, without malice or mercy.

The hum grew louder. Not in her ears—in her chest. In her teeth. In the spaces between her ribs. The presence was vast and close at the same time, the way the sky is vast and close, the way your own breath is vast and close when you finally stop to listen to it.

It had been waiting for her. Not impatiently—it didn't know impatience. It had been waiting the way stone waits, the way deep water waits. It didn't mind that she'd taken so long. It would wait forever. It had nothing else to do.

And she felt—in her body, not her mind—how tired she was.

Her shoulders wanted to drop. Her jaw wanted to unclench. Every muscle she'd held tight for forty-seven years was asking permission to let go. The headache behind her eyes faded to almost nothing, and she realized it had always been there, her whole life, the cost of resistance she'd paid so long she'd forgotten it was a payment.

She realized she was leaning toward the window. Her forehead nearly touching the glass. Her body had decided before her mind caught up, already softening toward something vast and welcoming.

She could let go.

The presence wouldn't hurt her. It would just... welcome her. Into the grey. Into the fullness. Into what everyone else already saw. The fighting could stop. The holding on could stop. She could finally rest.

She thought of David. Grey-David—quieter, dimmer, the version everyone else had seen while she saw sun on his shoulders and sweat on his back. But still David. Still the man she'd loved. Wouldn't that be enough?

She thought of Trisha. Her daughter's eyes, full of something Nadine had never been able to see. But full of love, too. Wasn't it? It looked like love.

She could join them.

She wanted to join them.

Her hands had stopped shaking. She noticed this, and some part of her tried to start them shaking again.

They didn't.

In panic, she forced herself to concentrate. Rain. Rain on the window. The smell of—the word was gone, petri-something, but it wouldn't come—the sound of drops hitting glass, hitting earth, hitting everything. She strained to hear it, strained to remember what water sounded like falling from the sky.

Slowly, faintly, the patter returned.

She backed away from the window. Went to bed. Pulled the covers over her head like a child.

But she knew now. Her body had already chosen. It was only a matter of time before the rest of her caught up.

And part of her—the part she was most afraid of—was grateful.

---

She woke to silence.

No rain. No anchor. No resistance left.

She lay still for a long moment, waiting for panic. It didn't come.

She got out of bed. Her head didn't hurt. For the first time in decades—maybe the first time ever—the chronic ache behind her eyes was gone. Her shoulders weren't tense. Her jaw wasn't clenched. Something warm pulsed in her chest—a slow, heavy rhythm she'd never felt before. Like a second heartbeat. Like being held from the inside.

She walked to the window.

The grey was full now. Present. Alive with something she could finally see. It was vast—the way weather is vast, the way a year is vast. Too large to see all at once. It moved through the world like seasons, like breath. It had always been here. Everyone else had always known.

And for just a moment, she saw it clearly—not a shape, not a form, but a density in the grey, a place where the world bent around something that didn't belong to any dimension she had words for. It looked at her. It looked through her. It saw everything she had been and everything she would become and it loved her the way the ocean loves the shore—endlessly, erosively, without the slightest awareness that love and destruction might be different things.

Then the moment passed, and she couldn't remember what she'd seen, only that she'd seen it, only that it had been beautiful.

This was what Trisha saw. What the old man saw. What everyone had been seeing while Nadine hallucinated light and rain and a world that had never existed.

She thought of the sun. The word was there—sun—but the meaning had emptied out of it like water from a cracked cup.

She thought of rain. Couldn't remember the sound. Couldn't remember the smell. There had been a word for that smell. It started with P. She was almost certain it started with P.

She couldn't remember the word. She couldn't remember why it mattered.

She thought of David in the garden. She could see him—grey-David, quiet-David—working in the soil, looking up as she came out with a glass of something in her hand. But the sunburned shoulders were gone. The lemonade was gone. The squinting, smiling, sweating David who'd said come help me and so burn, it's worth it—he was gone. Had never existed.

She tried to feel what she'd lost. She remembered that she had loved a man in sunlight, a man with red shoulders and a squinting smile. She remembered that losing this should hurt. But the feelings wouldn't come. They were like photographs of photographs—copies of copies, fading with each generation until nothing remained but shapes.

Something in her chest should have been hurting. It wasn't. The warm pulse continued, steady and patient.

Her shoulders dropped. Her jaw unclenched. Her whole body softened toward something vast and welcoming.

She picked up the phone. Dialed Trisha's number.

"Mom?"

"I can see it now."

A breath. Then a sound—a sob—of pure joy.

"Oh, Mom. I'm so glad you're finally okay."

"I'm resolved," Nadine said. The word felt correct.

"Yes. You're well."

Nadine looked out the window. The presence moved—not toward her, just near her, the way weather moves across a landscape. She nodded at it. The warm pulse in her chest answered—a gentle expansion, a settling. She felt her body tilt toward the hum at the edge of hearing.

The way you'd lean toward music. The way you'd lean toward home.

---

Nadine went to work.

Same office. Same desk. Same grey light through the windows. But she saw it differently now.

Patty smiled at her. "You look different today, Nadine."

"I feel different."

"Better?"

Nadine considered. Watched something vast drift past the window. Tilted her head toward the hum. The warm pulse in her chest expanded, contracted, expanded. It felt like belonging. It felt like finally being in the right place after a lifetime of standing just outside the door.

"Corrected," she said.

She sat at her desk. Began her work. Paused when the presence passed, nodded, continued. The rhythm felt natural.

Her pen was by the window. She didn't retrieve it.

At lunch, she went home. Found the seedlings on her kitchen windowsill—the five remaining plants, yellow and wilted. She looked at them for a long moment. Something about them. Something about David.

Her hands reached for the pots before she knew why. Her fingers touched the soil, and something flickered—a memory of kneeling on the porch in the rain, laughing, telling something to hang on. Her hands remembered. Her mind didn't.

She threw the seedlings in the trash. One by one. The pots made a hollow sound against the bottom of the bin.

She rinsed her hands in the sink. The faucet dripped its slow rhythm, one drop every four seconds, and she didn't know why she'd ever noticed that. She dried her hands on the towel by the stove and looked at David's coffee mug on the second shelf, the one with the chipped handle, and she couldn't remember why she'd kept it. Her hand reached for it and paused—Loss, something whispered, a voice from very far away—and then she put the mug in the cabinet with the others.

At five, she drove home. The grey was beautiful now—not oppressive, just present. Full. She understood why everyone else had always seemed so calm.

She made dinner. Ate alone. Felt no loneliness.

She picked up the phone once. Her hand went to the dial pad. She was going to call someone. Someone important.

She couldn't remember who.

She put the phone down. It didn't matter. Nothing from before mattered.

She went to bed early. Fell asleep instantly, without effort, without resistance. No dreams. No memories of sunlight or rain. No word for the smell of storms on summer earth—that word that started with P, that word she'd almost known, that word that meant something she could no longer reach. Petri-something. The shape of it was still there, but the meaning was gone, and soon the shape would be gone too, and she would never have known it at all.

No headache. No tension. No fighting.

Somewhere in what remained of her—deep, deeper than she could reach—something that used to be Nadine Faulk was trying to scream. But even that was fading now. Even that was being corrected. The warm pulse in her chest expanded, and the scream grew quieter, and the word she'd been reaching for her whole life—petrichor, the smell of rain on dry earth, the smell of summer storms and front porches and David beside her waiting for lightning—dissolved into the grey like everything else, and soon there would be nothing left but the hum and the fullness and the vast fond thing that had been waiting for her since before she was born.

She was resolved now.

She was finally well.
 

END