Rain (Hudson 1)

"Let's not lie to each other, Rain," she followed. "At least let's not do that."

I didn't speak.

She wasn't really all wrong. I always felt Mama looked at me in a different way. I just didn't know why and I didn't want to find out. I was afraid. I don't know why I had a stream of fear running through the back of my thoughts, but it ran, thin and silvery, like a thread of light I was afraid to touch. It was safer in the dark.

I went to bed and lay there quietly, looking up at the ceiling.

"I hate him," Beni muttered. "I hate him for what he's doing to us. Don't you?"

"No. I don't hate him. I can't hate him. I don't understand him, but I don't want to hate him. He's our father, Beni."

"I don't care who he is. I do hate him," Beni said. "Sometimes, Mama's wrong. Sometimes, hating makes you feel better. It makes you...stronger. That's something you oughta learn, Rain. That's something you oughta learn from me."

She was silent for a moment and then she braced herself on her elbows and looked over at me.

"Maybe that's why Mama cares more about you," Beni said, sounding like she was solving her own dilemma, "maybe she knows you're weaker than me and you need more protection. Yeah," she said lying back on her pillow, "I bet that's it."

She liked that idea. I could almost hear her smile of satisfaction. It helped her close her eyes and go back to sleep.

Maybe she's right, I thought. Maybe I am weaker. Maybe Beni had a better chance to survive in this hard world because of the way she was.

I turned over and traveled a different road to the same darkness.

1

The Beginning

of the End

.

For as long as I could remember, we lived in an

apartment located in a building complex everyone called The Projects. Even as a little girl I hated the name. It didn't sound like a home, a place to live with your family. It sounded just like the word suggested: some government undertaking, some attempt to deal with the poor, some bureaucrat's program. Beni called it The Cages, which made me feel like we were being treated like animals.

I suppose at one time the buildings looked clean and new. In the beginning there wasn't gang graffiti scribbled madly over every available space creating the Books of Madness, as I liked to describe them. The streets in front weren't dirty and the small patches of lawn didn't look mangy and sick. Now the whole place seemed like someone's ashtray.

Our apartment was on the second floor: twofifteen. We were lucky because we could use the stairway when the elevator was broken, which was often, and we weren't on the first floor where there was a greater chance for burglaries. Some of the tenants on the first floor actually had bars installed in their windows, which was why Beni named the complex The Cages. It didn't do any good to tell her that bars on cages were meant to keep animals in, not people out. She claimed the government wanted to keep us locked inside.

"We're like some ugly pimple on the face of the capital. I bet the government people don't want foreigners to see us. That's why they don't take them through our streets," she declared, parroting one of Ken's freq

uent speeches of self-pity.

I couldn't deny that there was a lot of fear and crime around us. Everyone had some kind of an alarm and often they went off accidentally. It had gotten so no one paid much attention to them. If there was ever an example of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, it was here in The Projects.

Beni, Roy and I had only three city blocks to walk to school, but sometimes we felt we were going through a minefield in a war zone. During the last six months, two people had been killed by stray bullets fired from passing cars, one gang shooting at members of another without regard for innocent bystanders. Everyone thought it was terrible, but went on and accepted it as if it was simply a part of what had to be, like some nasty storm coming through. There wasn't much anyone could do about bad weather and most people had the same attitude about our street crime.

Mama was visibly terrified whenever one of us went out after dark. She'd actually start to tremble. I began to think we weren't living much differently than people in the Middle Ages. When our teacher talked about the fortresses, the moats and drawbridges and the dangers that lurked outside the fortress walls back then, I thought about The Projects now. Beside having alarms and bars on windows, everyone locked his doors three or four ways with chain locks, bolts and bars and did the same with the windows. Many of the elderly sat away from their windows and shivered at the sounds of the night, the screaming in the hallways.

From my window I could just manage to see the lights in some of the government buildings, and when we walked a few blocks east and looked toward the Capitol, we could see the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial all lit up with promises. We were able to take some class trips to the sites and even tour places like the Treasury Building where we saw money being printed, and the FBI building, where we learned about crime labs and fingerprints. We never saw the Congress in action, but we did visit the buildings.

I sometimes felt like an astronaut on these class trips. It was as if we were being transported to another planet. We saw the fine homes, the embassies, how rich and prosperous people were. We heard about all the wonderful hopes these buildings and monuments represented, but we always returned to our reality where it was possible to witness a drug sale on the corner, or see an unattended child wandering near broken glass and rusty metal. What will become of him? I wondered. What will become of us? In school we studied about democracy and we were taught dreams that were apparently reserved for other sleeping faces, not ours.

Recently, someone overdosed on heroin under a stairwell in our building. The police swarmed over the hallway like blue bees and then left as quickly as they had come, none of them seemed surprised or even concerned. I think they, too, had come to accept the horrors the same way we had.

Mama always dreamed of getting us out of here, of course. To me it seemed most of the people who lived here could no longer even imagine that for themselves. Mama wouldn't talk to anyone but us about it because she hated the dark, heavy notes of discouragement. Once, when Ken was doing well, not drinking as much and making a decent wage, we were able to put away enough money to actually consider the possibility of at least renting a small house in a better neighborhood, but then one day Ken went and secretly withdrew the money. I remember how Mama came home looking drained of blood after she had discovered what he had done.

"He killed our dreams," she mumbled. I thought Mama was going to have a heart attack. Her lips looked so blue and she seemed to have trouble breathing. She had to have a shot glass full of