Samantha had boarded up the roof more times than she could count. She’d called every repairman in town and each one took their shot. And still, whenever it rained, the water always leaked in. The cracks in the ceiling were invisible when the air was dry and clear, but they appeared with any humidity: black jagged slashes, deep and long across the bumpy white plaster.
The house had become a landmark in the village—sort of a haunted house with really wet ghosts. Old men told stories about the house to their grandkids to scare the crap out of them. Those same kids would sneak around outside of it late at night, run up and touch the front door, then run back giggling to their friends.
The old maids in town would gossip about it and swear that when it rained it fell more heavily inside the house than outside. That wasn’t true, Samantha would think wisely as she’d pass them in the market with her nose upturned; it just appeared to be more because the water built up behind the cracks then poured in like a funnel. So the water fell in sheets, not droplets.
All of her friends and distant relatives told her to move, to leave the shitty money pit behind, because it wasn’t good for anything. It was too big for her anyway; she didn’t have a husband or kids, or even a dog. There were plenty of places to move to—it was always a buyer’s market somewhere. Her parents would have told them plenty of good reasons, but Samantha would just tell them she’d sunk too much money into the house to give it up. The lie was solid.
It was a roomy one-level house, two bedrooms and one and a half baths. Her great-grandfather had built it when the town was just a general store and a post office, right after arriving from the old country. He lined the hallways and crawl spaces with bookshelves, which had given birth to an extensive collection of literature—all which were now in storage seven miles away. The shelves were now lined only with water-proof plastic toys, mostly from Happy Meals. Sometimes they’d fall to the floor, when the wooden shelving swelled too much, and she’d watch them get carried off by a stream of water, ending up at the space under the back door where the water always ended up. She’d pick them up so there was no flooding.
When it rained in the morning she sat in the breakfast nook, timing the water hitting the window pane with the droplets of water splashing into the pot beside her coffee mug. Sometimes for kicks she’d take off all her clothes and run through the house instead of showering. Every leak had become as familiar as the formation of the plastic-covered furniture, and she’d set out a path from each room in the house to the next that would minimize the amount of water that would touch her. She could stay indoors the whole day and remain completely dry.
The wallpaper inside needed to constantly be reapplied. She’d painted it at first, but found that recoating peeling paint on walls was more annoying than repapering it. She’d had to remove all the carpeting and replaced it all with linoleum in every room. The entire floor was really just one giant piece of linoleum. Any cracks or spaces would further rot the foundation, which was on the brink of collapsing anyway.
As a child, when there were storms, sometimes her mother would take her to the shed in the backyard and they’d watch through the foggy window as the water filled the house and poured out in rivers from under the door. There was a rocking chair next to her father’s tool bench and they’d sit in it and rock back and forth for hours. She saw lightning light up the house and would swear the bolts were produced within it. The thunder that followed, she would say, was the house moving just a little bit, trying to dry off.
Her mother thought of the rain as God’s messengers. They were tiny droplets of angels, all singing about life as they pattered on the floor. They came in through the roof because their carols were ignored when they just fell outside. Samantha never thought like that, even as a little girl. She thought that her mother didn’t want to pay for a repairman since her father passed away, because he had fixed everything. She hated her mother for it and vowed that when the house became hers, she would sell it or fix it or just leave it to be condemned.
She spent every rainy day walking from room to room, pretending like she knew why. She could hear the laughter of the children and see the scoffing of her neighbors. There was no reason that the rain should keep falling. She’d have the whole damn roof replaced if she had to. And tears welled up, ignored in the rain all around her.
When times were at their worst, Samantha would sit in the enclosed porch, the vinyl coating on her card table wearing away from drop after relentless drop. Soon, her anger would give way to a calming meditative state that she’d discovered as a teenager, trapped on rainy days in the water, with no escape inside or outside. First she heard the drops hit the roof, and they made small whooshing sounds as they slipped in between the shingles. Then she heard the fall, the loud, overwhelming sound of several dozen little waterfalls, and finally the rush of water as it once again left the house. When she’d open her eyes again, the first thing she’d see was the shed with the little window and the rocking chair, and then the world around her would become lucid.
She’d go back in and feel at peace with this giant puzzle, and sleep, knowing deep in her heart until the next rainy day, just like the rest of her family, that she could never leave.
