A Fistful of Rain

was from above, as if the photographer had straddled my body, looking down. My eyes were half-closed, my mouth slightly open, my hair a mess, and some of it hung over my eyes, but not enough to disguise my features. My right hand extended up above the pillows and out of the frame, with the shot cropped just above my knees.

My left hand was resting between my thighs.

The caption read COME MAKE PUSSY PURR.

Chapel hadn’t moved in his chair, hadn’t even turned to look at me, but I put my back to him, anyway, trying to find something else to see. Mount Hood didn’t help; it didn’t matter where I looked.

Me with my hand between my thighs. Me with one hand between my thighs and the other over my head, and what’s next, a shot with me taking it from behind?

I put my head against the window, closed my eyes. The glass was cold and a relief against my skin.

So now I’m a whore, I thought. Now the world thinks I’m a drunk and a whore.

Graham and Click and Van would see these pictures, they’d see them, the people at the label would see them, the reporters and the photographers and Pete from Christchurch and the groupie from Montreal. Joan’s students would see these pictures, would trade them back and forth in e-mails, maybe print them out, maybe bring them to school. Would they tell her? Would they laugh? Would she see them, too?

“Miriam—”

I shook my head. I didn’t trust my voice, I didn’t trust that I could tell him to be quiet, to go to hell. I was thinking of Steven and how at least he couldn’t see his daughter like this, wouldn’t know that the world had seen it, too. God in heaven, even I thought it looked like I was doing myself, that damn pose, that left between my legs, my right above my head, I might as well have been arching into it—

“Miriam—”

I snapped back, launched myself at the desk, grabbing past Chapel for the mouse. I clicked in vain, frustrated, tried to find a way to do what I wanted, but I couldn’t make the computer go, and Chapel had to reach for my arm, saying my name again.

“Mim. Calm down.”

I shoved the mouse, stepped back, pointing at the screen, at the third picture.

“I’ll close them—”

“No!” I snarled. “No, no, my arm, dammit, my arm, in the picture.”

Chapel looked at me, utterly lost.

I jabbed my index finger at the picture, at my right arm, extending out of the frame. “There!”

He looked from it back to me, then again, bewildered. “I don’t—”

“Bigger! Make it bigger!”

Chapel hesitated, but only for a second, then took the mouse and began clicking. He surrounded my arm, clicked again, and it filled the screen. Glorious full color, my arm.

With blood just barely visible, seeping out from beneath it.

Chapel turned, confused and concerned and hoping for an explanation, and I just couldn’t talk. The only thing I could give him was my right hand, palm up, the bandage Joan had put on me still wrapped around it.

He looked from my palm to my face, still not getting it, and he said, “I don’t understand—”

“Home,” I managed.

CHAPTER 14

There were three of them, from a firm called Burchett Security: a woman in her early thirties who looked strong and intense and never spoke and frankly scared me; a man in his late twenties who reminded me of the sailors who’d attended the Tailhook shows we’d played in San Diego; and Richard Burchett himself, who was perhaps in his mid-fifties, light brown hair a little shaggy, beard and mustache trimmed, in Levi’s and cowboy boots and a St. Louis Cardinals fan shirt.

Chapel told me that they were professional, thorough, and discreet. He told me they knew what they were doing. He told me to trust them.

Burchett and his crew used gadgets that they held in their hands and gadgets that hung from their belts and gadgets that they slung over their shoulders. They wore headphones and waved magic metallic wands. They dismantled outlets and fixtures and searched moldings and pictures and unplugged appliances and utilities. They moved furniture and lifted rugs, and every time they found something, they used a little pin with a hot pink plastic flag on its end to mark the location.

They’d used twelve of those pink plastic flags before they were through.

Chapel sat with me on the back porch while Burchett and his crew did their work, and that was when I told him about my two stalker incidents.

“You were abducted at gunpoint and you didn’t think to call me?” He looked like he was on the verge of a seizure. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I didn’t fucking know you existed,” I reminded him.

“Tell me you at least called the police.”

“They thought I was full of shit. They didn’t go so far as to actually say it, but it was pretty evident that that’s what they thought. They told me it was probably a mugging gone wrong or something like that.”

“A man points a gun at you, puts you in the back of his truck, strips you, and they call that a mugging gone wrong?” Chapel shook his head.

“They wanted me to go to a doctor, have a rape kit done.”

“Did you?”

“I wasn’t raped. The only time he ever touched me was to get me into the truck.” I thought about it for a couple seconds, then said, “Maybe that’s why, you know? He wasn’t about me, he was about the cameras. Maybe that’s what he was doing, why he was in the house last night.”

“Maybe, but then why the whole bit with the truck and the clothes the first time?”

“I don’t know.”

“You called the cops after last night?”

I shook my head.

“You should have called the cops as soon as you were out of the house.”

“They didn’t seem to take me real seriously the first time.”

“You should have called them, anyway.”

“So we’ll call them now.”

“You could, but with the discovery of the cameras, we’ll have the same situation we were talking about at the office. Unless you’ve changed your mind about the media.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Then we don’t call the cops at this juncture. We’ll see what Rick finds, take it from there.”

I didn’t say anything, and he went back inside, to follow Burchett and his people around, leaving me alone. After a few minutes I went down to the music room and grabbed the Taylor, then returned to the porch. It seemed best to stay out of everyone’s way.

I played for a bit, but nothing sounded right, and after a while I gave up. Once I started thinking about the pictures again, about all the people who had seen them, and all the people who would see them, and it was enough to start me feeling good and sorry for myself, and it almost brought tears.

But it brought a memory, too, of being maybe seven or eight years old on a late summer afternoon, the coolness of our tract home in Gresham. Tommy, still in his work clothes, caked in a mix of dried sweat and cement dust. He’d bought a six of Coors and a pack of Marlboros, and dropped himself on the couch to smoke and drink and listen to music on the hi-fi, and I was sitting with him, my head against his chest as we listened to Gordon Lightfoot singing “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

And Tommy had gotten all weepy at the end of the song, and I’d asked him why someone would make a song like that, about something so horrible and sad.

“Because sometimes making a song about something sad is the only way to understand it,” he’d told