Raining In Paradise

By Barrett McCloud

A wayward son encounters his late father’s band of brothers. Kindred rebel spirits come together in the turbulent late ‘60s. A child grows up dreaming of Mars, and of going there. In this collection of 17 short stories, life at its most unexpected and inexplicable unfolds from the foothills of L.A. to the dappled skies of New England, awaiting the unwary. Barrett McCloud is a short-story writer and poet. He resides in Southern California where he is inspired by the incandescent sea but also by the secrets revealed on rare gray days.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: May 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781483481883

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Raining

in Paradise

Barrett McCloud

Copyright © 2018 Barrett McCloud.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-8189-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-8188-3 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 03/13/2018

On Raining in Paradise …

The men, women and children of Raining in Paradise are no more than mortal. Yet many of them are imbued even in the unlikeliest of circumstances with preternatural courage.

Not long ago, a friend, one possessed of such extraordinary bravery and herself on the doorstep of Paradise, whispered to me advice that in retrospect I remember only as Live and Love. The words in between, whatever they may have been, were reminders that there is more than mere survival that propels us all along our fleeting, singular journeys. There is whatever it is we reach for, with our fingers outstretched, strained with hope and longing.

– Barrett McCloud, November 2017

I hear you, in the rain, as it comes down

The way your hair does in the half-light

Of dawn, scarcely making a sound.

You cling to the branches of the cypress

We planted in another lifetime

With a fire inside and the sea beside us.

In the crest of the pale hammock moon,

Wispy as the canvas of sky brightens,

You recline and gaze … and swoon.

The Black Wave

They come to get me at 4:30 in the morning. First, they untie my hospital gown and help me to the bathroom and make me take not one, but two lukewarm showers. Before I’ve dried off completely, they lay me down and shave my chest with a hand razor until I am snow-white and bare, like a child. Then they give me five minutes. We’ll be right back, they say.

I lie there, covered just to my waist in a heated blanket, shivering up to my neck, staring at the circular light fixture protruding from the ceiling. Thinking of five minutes shrinking to four and three and two … thinking of yesterday and the day before that and the month before that … thinking, and remembering, how to pray.

All right. This is out of my hands now. I’ve done all I can do. If this is it, this is it. I’m at peace.

I close my eyes, but the persistent glare of the ceiling light burns through. No matter. I’ll be asleep soon enough. I am not at peace. I am about to be at war.

You’re not really supposed to survive a five-way bypass. Of course, it happens. People do survive. I guess you could call them literally the stout-hearted ones, or the blessed ones. But the quintuple bypass isn’t known as The Widowmaker for nothing. Many never leave the table breathing.

Ah, yes. Breathing. They stop it when you’re under to be cut up. They stop your heart from beating when they’re in there, tying one, or two, or three, or four, or five of the damaged arteries with veins taken from your leg, or from somewhere. First they crack your chest like an egg; and when it’s over and you’re still alive they sew it up the way you’d sew back together a sweater that had lost its buttons.

When I open my eyes, I start to gag. Whatever they’d forced down my throat during the surgery is still in there.

Hold on. Hold on, you’re all right! a smiling woman in white assures me.

What she doesn’t say is You’re alive.

I am. I fucking am.

The war is over. The aftermath, the reconstruction, the reparations are still to come.

Dr. Raphael calls it the black wave. That’s uncharacteristically poetical for him. His language is the language of The Clinical, that sect of hard-and-fast, diploma’d pill dispensers for whom no psycho-medical pedagogy is beyond memorization or regular practice. Depression, he says, at the same juncture of each prescribed session between us, is a common, even inevitable, symptom of recovery from major surgery. Men are more susceptible than women, and younger men are more susceptible than older men. Blah blah blah.

There are moments, when I sit across from Raphael in the den of his San Marino home that he has converted into a patient treatment room, when I see him but don’t hear him at all. I hear the gurgle of the Zen tabletop water fountain over his shoulder on a bookcase. I hear the trill of sparrows through the window, perched high in one of the elm trees in his front yard. His words might as well be mush.

I carry around this long, tubular pillbox now, and there are things that rattle inside when you shake it – things round and oblong, bright red and pasty white. The box goes with me wherever I go and will never, ever be thrown away. Raphael has his own prescription pills for me inside: Re-uptake inhibitors, he calls them, reverting to the language of The Clinical.

Will you just call them what they are, man? Anti-depressants.

Better still, call them a means of escaping the black wave, a terrifying, unstoppable harbinger of doom. That sounds more frightening, but in fear there is adrenaline, and besides: I’ve known fear and survived it.

You’ve knocked on the door of hell, Michael, Raphael said once, in a previous session set to the music of his tabletop water fountain, in another uncharacteristic deviation from the language of The Clinical. I barged out of that visit prematurely, thinking: Why hell? Why not heaven?

I live alone, as I have since my woefully short marriage ended and Carrie moved out almost two years ago. I take care of myself and don’t think twice about it. Well, at least it used to be that way.

The first month I was home from the hospital after my surgery, a thin, freckled nurse who didn’t seem to do more than take my blood pressure and temperature visited me every day. Every other day, a hulking but soft-spoken physical therapist called on me, at first to just make sure I was doing my arm and leg cardio-isometrics, then to walk around the neighborhood block with me, a bit longer distance each visit. They don’t come now, either one of them, and I don’t miss them.

I got more mail in that first month than I had my entire life preceding it. The friends and well-wishers seem to multiply when one of their own has his or her life threatened. I’m not diminishing the gestures or the concern, because it meant a hell of a lot at the time.

You’re a trouper, Michael. You’re going to make it and be better than ever!

All our love in your healing time, sweet Michael.

I can’t believe that one with a heart as good as yours could have had one that was damaged.

It wasn’t always poetry that arrived in the mail, embedded in colored envelopes and addressed in scripted words and numbers and in some cases enhanced with illustrated balloons or smiling hearts or happy emoticons. But it didn’t have to be poetry, either.

Carrie, already married again, phoned once from her new home in Vermont the week I came home from cardiac rehab. Maybe two minutes went by between How are you feeling, Michael? and Well, gotta go.

I don’t miss her, either. Not anymore.

I do miss Donna when she’s not here. She’s only 10 minutes away, in Eagle Rock, but she’s raising her little boy, Shawn, mostly by herself, and he needs her too. She loves us both. I know she loves me, even though only six months into our relationship this thing, this goddamned THING, happened to me. But she’s here when she can be. She’s my daylight and my night light.

Donna sings in the choir at her church, New Revelation Missionary Baptist in Pasadena. A week after they cut me open and I lived to tell about it, she enlisted the whole of the church congregation to pray for me. Donna told me all about it: The minister at Sunday morning service looked to the rafters and, arms extended and eyes rolled upward, recited: Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save him that is sick.

I was relieved I wasn’t in attendance to hear it. The anointing-with-oil line suggested, at least to me, that I was already dead.

The following day, Donna brought two of her girlfriends from the church choir over to the house and, dressed in their flowing robes and starched white collars, they linked arms and sang together God’s Got Those Healing Hands. I lay there, benumbed with Vicodin, propped up with cushions on either side of me so that I couldn’t roll over onto my stitches, and through watery eyes watched this blur of black skin, blue robes and white collars swaying back and forth at the foot of my bed.

I must have fallen asleep during this, because when next I awoke, the eggshell bedroom curtains were gray in twilight. The faint aroma of jasmine wafted through the crack in the glazed window. The red, heart-shaped therapeutic pillow I’d been sent home with was tucked beneath my head. My Russian Blue cat, Ivan, was curled up at my feet, lightly snoring. Donna, wearing just the long purple Lakers T-shirt that she usually slept in, lay on the futon she’d moved into the bedroom. I could see her chest moving up and down as she seemed to sleep – but if she was, it was a fitful slumber. There were whimpers in her breathing audible above the whistle of the cat’s snore and the hum of cars traveling Arroyo Boulevard.

I reach for a plastic bottle of water on the night table beside the bed, and drink. My legs are stiff. I want to get up, stretch and then run, up the street, all the way to Brookside Park. I want to run the bases on the softball field, hurdle the blooms in the flower garden and bolt for the aquatic center, where I’d scale the chain-link fence and dive, head-first, into the swimming pool. When I emerged, cleansed, I’d be free.

Donna and I went to the park just the other day with Shawn, and as we passed the gate to the aquatic center, I remembered how that impulse felt, the overwhelming desire to put all the shit behind me at once and start over, be the same 45-year-old guy I was before. The guy with the requisite number of neuroses and normal physical consequences of practicing law, paying alimony and overdoing it at tennis. Raphael tells me it doesn’t happen that way. Physical recovery from bypass surgery takes three to six months, depending on the patient. Psychological recovery? No timetable.

Just keep taking your medication, Michael, he says, and taking each day one at a time.

I bite my tongue, but I think: Thank you, Dr. Feel-Good.

I’ve become preoccupied with this notion of the black wave. It’s reached the point where I see it in my dreams, or at least see what I think it might look like were it not something in my head: It comes from beyond a peaceful ice-blue horizon, at first shrouded in cloudy mist, then taking shape as it rolls steadily toward the shore, and toward me. Three or four storeys high, it’s like this great, monstrous, undulating wall-in-motion, irresistible and omnipotent.

I make love to Donna now – there’s no recovery-related, what-if-I-have-a-heart-attack? anxiety any longer – and when I do make love to her I’m reminded that the rest of the world has not only gone on, but it’s still quite beautiful. There’s something about the generosity of her touch and the kindness glowing deep in her eyes, and most of all, the way her heart sounds, vibrantly beating in her chest when I lay my head against it, that I’m unable to articulate.

So it doesn’t make sense to me that I wake, feeling quite alone, just hours later. Donna’s there, balled up beside me on the bed, and Ivan’s there, snoring in a chair close by, and the setting sun is creeping like a burglar through the drapes, but what the hell’s wrong, I wonder?

That jittery vulnerability has become a bad habit. I want to know why, and I want to stop it.

Is it your meds? Donna asked me just this morning over our uneaten breakfasts at the kitchen table. Do they need to be adjusted, Michael?

I don’t know.

Maybe it’s work. Maybe you’ve gone back too soon. A familiar frustration ran across her face. You could talk to Dr. Raphael.

I don’t want to talk to Dr. Raphael, the expert, and in spite of what she’d just suggested, Donna knows it.

She squeezed my hand. I want to help you. Whatever I can do. Her eyes were wet. I wrapped her in my arms and eased her into my lap. She smoothed my hair. Would you like to talk with Pastor Graves, Michael? I could ask him to come over. I’m sure he would.

How could a pastor be named Graves, I stewed, unless he was all about burying people? I kept this to myself.

Donna, I don’t want to talk about God right now.

She straightened up in my lap. It doesn’t have to be ‘about God,’ Michael. The pastor, he’s a good listener.

I brushed the side of her face with my fingers. I’ve got a good listener, I said. I kissed her parted lips. So please. I don’t need one with an agenda.

Donna’s eyes flared. Pastor Graves does not have an agenda.

He’s a minister. How can he not have an agenda?

He’s a friend, Michael, and he’s a good man. He helps people all the time, whether they go to his church or not.

Donna, just drop it.

She clambered out of my lap and stood before me, hands on her wide hips. I don’t understand. You feel bad, Michael. And you aren’t certain why. If you don’t want to talk to Dr. Raphael, then maybe there’s somebody else. You never know where answers come from.

The moment I said Prayer isn’t the answer, I regretted it. God and heaven and divine destiny – they’re all important to Donna. Her lower lip quivered. I’d hurt her.

I got up and clasped her shoulders. I’m sorry, Donna. I know you’ve got your faith and how much it means to you. But I can’t put mine in prayers OR pills. I paused. I do have faith in you. I tried to pull her toward my chest. She stiffened.

Sometimes you don’t act like it, she said, and it scares me.

I threw out my hands. What the hell do you want me to do?

Her head dropped forward. I don’t know. Her voice cracked. I don’t know, Michael.

I can’t be something I’m not, Donna.

I’m not asking you to, she looked up.

It’s just that I’m trying to fight this in my own way.

Why does it have to be a fight, Michael?

Because I need to feel better!

You will, Michael. You will feel better.

I knew she wouldn’t quote Scripture, but I wasn’t certain she wouldn’t quote Pastor Graves. Instead, she slipped a red cardigan sweater over her starched white blouse, smoothed out the wrinkles in the elbows and said she had to get to work.

I turn in bed and kiss Donna’s bare shoulder. She is deeply asleep and looks small and limp, as though she’d come undone in my arms if I tried to lift her. But she is strong. Stronger than I am.

The sun’s down and there’s a vaguely unsettling chill in the room that’s seeped beneath the cracked window. I sink down onto the rumpled pillow and fold my arms around Donna’s waist. Her belly is warm.

How can I feel alone? Like I did that cold morning they came for me in the hospital?

I slam my eyes