Gerard's Rain

As the train pulled out from the station, Elsi watched the tail lights of the steel tube as it rolled itself away into the distance. She smiled while she watched, but with a tear rolling down her face. Her emotions would not contain herself inside of her. She was crying over her dearest boyfriend, who was on the train she was watching. In the previous week, she told him that she didn’t want him to go.

            “Gerard…” Elsi said one night, after the couple had made dinner in their apartment.

            “I won’t be gone for too long, Elsi.” Gerard replied, remaining calm. “I’ve just got to go away for my friend’s funeral. I’ll be back before you can say my name.”

            “That’s the thing; you won’t be back that fast. I know you…I know that you take your time when you’re at places. Remember when we went to Spain for that first week of spring? I went back to the hotel after we were at that bar while you stayed there and got drunk. If you ever cared, I cried that night; I didn’t sleep that night, because you weren’t there to be beside me.”

            “Elsi, I explained that to you…”

            “No, your explanation was that you got your drunken a*s beat up in some youth hostel, and then you got thrown out of there. You said that you tried to go back to the hotel, but some people stopped you. And you never told me who those people were.”

            “I did tell you…”

            “No, you didn’t!” Her eyes were ready to burst forth with tears. “You didn’t tell me, and I thought you were with some other woman.” Elsi went into the small living room that they had in their apartment. She sat down on the couch in the room, curled her legs in, and sat straight up and looked at the wall opposite the couch. Gerard came into the room and sat down next to her. He put her arm around her, and she started to let tears roll down her face.

            “I didn’t cheat on you.” Gerard said.

            “Do you mean that?” Elsi asked.

            “I meant it with everything that I am.”

            “Thank you.” Elsi still cried, and the two of them ended up falling asleep on the piece of furniture that night.

            Elsi always hated it when they got into situations like that. They were never really fights or arguments, rather, they were things that one or the other of them would say. There would be a reaction by either one of them, and normally, apologies would ensue. There were times that Elsi ended up leaving the apartment to go to a bar that she would find. She would never go to the same bar twice, because she always thought that Gerard would come to look for her. But, when she would return (and it would always be sometime at three o’clock in the morning), she would always find Gerard curled up on the bed that the two of them slept on. He would always have a note tucked into his hands; it would have water marks on it from his crying, which would make some of the pen ink smear.

            The notes would always apologize for whatever Gerard had done wrong. Elsi had all of the notes he’d written in her jewelry box, and she couldn’t remember one of them off of the top of her head, but she always forgave him when she read them. Every time that he’d written one of those notes, she cried a little bit for him, and she would always forgive him. To make known that his apology was noticed, Elsi would curl up into his arms (she could do this without waking him because by the time she would be home, he would be fast asleep).

            She remembered one time that he found her as she was walking out of the bar she’d gone to. She saw him after he called out her name. He was holding a note in his hand; she knew that it was for her. Like so many times before, she would read the note when she did not have to confront him. Some of the times that she would argue with him, it would only be for the purposes of making sure he was not falling into infidelity…this was one of those times when she did so.           

She never expected him to try to find her; she always thought that he would cry himself to sleep. They stared at each other as the two of them drew closer. Gerard extended the note to her, but the moment he did that, a thunderous clap resonated throughout the sky and commanded that the clouds break their levees that withheld their rains. Torrents of water poured down onto Elsi and Gerard in mere seconds. She took the now soaking note, put it in her pocket and stared deep into Gerard’s eyes. She could tell that he knew she was only testing his fidelity. She opened her mouth to talk, saying,

            “Gerard, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have doubted you…I know that you’re faithful, and…”

            He stopped her there. He locked his lips with hers and engaged in the dancing of their tongues. They kissed in the rain for what seemed like forever before their pulled away from each other just far enough. Gerard held her hand and led her to the car she had driven to the bar. She realized, at that moment, that Gerard had walked the entire distance from their apartment to the bar (at least more than ten miles). His knee was in bad condition, and he shouldn’t have been walking with it over such a distance. Elsi noticed this, and said,

            “Gerard…your knee; doesn’t it hurt?”

            “It hurt before I was near you.” He replied. He was limping to the car at the moment. Elsi opened the passenger side door for him, and she got into the driver’s seat. She wanted to get him home as quickly as possible, for she didn’t know how bad his knee was. Luckily, when they arrived home, his knee was not swollen in the least bit, and showed no signs of being in a worse state than before his trek.

            She comforted him in every way that she could think of during that night. He told her that his knee was fine, and that it just hurt a little bit. But she insisted on comforting him, giving him all of the pillows that were in the apartment, so that he could rest on them. Once he had all of the embroidered down and artificial feather cloth cases under his leg and around his body, Elsi found a place to curl herself into his side. He stroked her hair as he listened to her breathe. They both listened to the rain land on the rooftop of their apartment.

            “I love the rain.” Gerard said. “It’s one of the most beautiful things that nature can provide.” Then he looked to Elsi. “Well, you’re more beautiful than the rain.”

            They kissed when he said this. When their lips were done locking, they returned to their positions.

            “So the rain is yours?” Elsi asked.

            “In a way, I guess.” They chuckled a little bit at this. “I guess when it pours down heavily like it is now.” Gerard continued. “When it would rain like this when I was a kid, I would always go to the front window of the house and just watch the rain fall. I miss those Cape Cod rains. But anyway, I would always tell my mother how much I loved the heavy rains, and she ended up nicknaming the heavy rains ‘Gerard’s Rain’.”

            “So that was the major achievement of your childhood?” Elsi said. “Having rain patterns named after you?” They chuckled at her statement.

            “Well, what did you do with your childhood?” Gerard asked.

            “You know what I did; I won that piano competition when I was ten years old.” Elsi replied. “The song that I won it with a song called, Tuga. It means, sadness, in Croatian.”

            “Do you still remember the song?”

            “Yes…I’ll play it for you.” Elsi found her way out of her curled up position and walked over to the piano. She sat down at the bench as Gerard turned to watch her play. She laid her fingers on the keyboard and readied her arms and hands.

            She started to play, the song resonating through the air. The song was in the key of B minor, a key that demanded some feel of melancholy. She played it with the sort of flow and ease that Gerard had never seen out of her before. When she finished the song, they listened to the rain again, and Elsi curled up next to Gerard to fall asleep next to him. But before she fell asleep, she found a pen and wrote on Gerard’s hand these words: I love you.

 

            The night before Gerard had to leave, Elsi remembered that one moment that Gerard did find her walking out of the bar…she recalled everything from that night. She even played the song she had played that one night in the time before Gerard had to leave, and wrote, I love you, on Gerard’s hand.

            She smiled as she walked to her car from the train station and drove to her apartment.

 

            Gerard saw the words written on his hand as the train sped away from where it departed. He smiled at the words, and the song she played started to rehearse itself in Gerard’s head. He fell asleep with the notes playing and a smile on his face. But he was awoken to a shaking train; people were screaming and he did not know why. He looked to the woman sitting in the chair next to him and asked her what was happening. Just then, an engineer of the train came into the car and yelled,

            “The train’s derailing!”

            Every single bit of panic drove through Gerard at that moment. And at that moment, the train shook more violently, pushing luggage out of the compartments above the passengers. Some people were hit with the bags, trapped under them. But either way, it would not matter; there was no way anyone would get off of the train. The train finally tipped to the left so far that it fell over at too great a speed. The windows and the frame of the left side of the train became shrapnel as they scraped against the jagged rocks that lay next to the train tracks. The entire left side of the train became, simply, a death trap; no one who was sitting on the left side of that car would survive such a beating.

            Gerard was sitting on the left side of the train.

 

            Elsi was watching the local news channel, seeing the horror before her on the illuminated screen. Her grief was beyond tears, but she continued to cry, for she was staring at a picture of the train that her lover was on. She was sure that he was dead, as the body count rose and the likelihood that anyone survived diminished. Elsi heard a clap of thunder, and a bucketed downpour of rain came down onto the apartment that Elsi once shared with her lover. She managed to smile just the slightest bit, and said,

            “That’s Gerard’s Rain.”

Reviews

[♍ Kirstin ♎]

Ok.....it takes a lot for a story to make me cry so this was just amasing. And you really did out do yourself with this one XD

[Coyote Poetry]

The story was outstanding. I like the flow of the story. Making the character interesting and the story come alive. A surprise ending left the story with a sad and beautiful ending. Rain can bring peace to a broken heart. A outstanding story. Thank you.
Coyote

[Lily Mae]

You take your reader on a journey of love that most never can imagine. Of coarse we experience fear of infedelity, the return of a lover.. But you took it one step further by sharing with us the secret of the rain, the music played..on their heart strings. These things are what the heart holds in its own soul forever and is never forgotten.. To me this is an exceptional story and I'm so glad you shared it with me ...xx

[Julie Beth]

this was amazing you did an outstanding job i loved it keep it up :D

[halflives]

Beautiful. Absolutely gorgeous. Where do you come up with this stuff?