Downpour

By: Cal

The grey clouds above and the wet, slippery pavement below told all that it was a rainy day. Seagulls from the nearby Puget Sound drifted across the bleak, gray-hued sky while men and women strode along the sidewalk with their umbrellas in hand to hinder the falling rain.

I pulled into the alley to park my car behind the building complex and opened my umbrella to shield myself from the downpour. I walked past the Café Della Luna’s front entrance and unlocked the side door. Up a flight of stairs and to my left I came upon another door at the end of the hallway. I looked down at a slip of paper in my hand and up again at the door.

“Room 102,” I stated solemnly. I used my key to open the door and peered inside. It was small, about the size of a regular bedroom, and was just big enough to fit a bed and a desk with little room for anything else. There were several windows overlooking the streets below. It would take some time to get used to, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Actually, the view was really nice.

Before I venture any further, I’ll give you a little background to my life, so you’re not left in the dark. My name is Cal Blaine and I had turned eighteen a couple of months before. My jet-black hair was easily distinguishable among a crowd and my insatiable appetite for pizza was a known fact by most who knew me. For the most part I had a distant relationship with my parents because they were not home very often. I never liked school at all. When my parents found out that I wasn’t going to college, they cut my funds and kicked me out of the house.

Luckily, my Uncle Ben and Aunt Janet had an apartment in Seattle that they seldom used and let me live there until I gathered myself together and reevaluated things.

That night I laid awake to the sound of the pouring rain, which made me feel at peace. The sound that the rain emitted made it seem as though there were no tomorrow and time was standing still just for me. I stared out the window at the bright, luminescent moon, cradled between the numerous stars dotted across the vast grey sky as far as the eye could see, and wished that the night would never end.

I awoke to the chirping of birds and the streets already bustling with early morning commuters. It was Sunday now and the rain continued to fall. Most people who were already up and about were either leaving for work or looking for a half-decent diner opened at seven o’clock. I left my room and entered the café below for a warm breakfast meal. The owner and workers were friends with my Uncle Ben and welcomed me with open arms. For a while it was slightly awkward, but the feeling eventually passed.

It was early afternoon when I left the tranquility of the store and went to get some snacks at the market down the street. The sound of rain rattled in my brain as the monstrous clouds bellowed up above. Soon the rain was so bad that I stopped halfway through and sheltered in the Seattle Central Library. It was here that I met my first true friend while in Seattle, Robbie.

Robert Holten, or Robbie by most, was a Washington native who had been constantly moving all around the state since he was three. His parents lived in Arkansas, and he had decided to stay when his parents left Washington. He was a year older than me, but we got along great together. We began to hang out a lot over the next week as the rain cleared up, and he showed me around to The Columbia Center, Kerry Park, and Carkeek Park in the Broadview suburb. We were seen together so much that some might have mistaken us for brothers.

It had been two weeks since I had left home and decided I needed a job to help occupy some of my free time. I started working at the Pike Place Market selling navel oranges and other assorted fruits. This job began to help me understand work ethic and hard labor. It was a great character builder and kept me from vandalizing as a mean of occupying my time. I was changing inside, and I didn’t notice these changes until much later.

Robbie began introducing me to some of his other friends including guys named Will, Snake, Logan, and Charlie. I wasn’t too fond of many of Robbie’s friends because they were mostly skate punks and misfits, like I used to be. I was really surprised at the kind of friends Robbie had because he wasn’t like any of them. The only friend that I began to like was a girl named Natalie.

Natalie Porter was rough on the outside, but actually a decent girl trying to do something with her life. Her parents were divorced and she lived with her good-for-nothing mother in Rainer Valley, Washington. Her goal in life was always to find her father and live with him, but she just didn’t have enough money to leave. She rarely went home except on week days and spent most of her time loitering around stores with friends to pass the time.

It was mainly Robbie, Natalie, and I hanging out all around Seattle and its suburbs over the next month site-seeing and doing whatever else we wanted to do. While I was with them, I felt no need to act out in a different way than I was, but rather as myself. Neither they nor I cared about what we said or how goofy we might have acted at times and laughed at mostly everything. I would come back to my apartment late every night and just lay awake thinking of the fun times and how they shouldn’t end.

And they didn’t end, at least for awhile they didn’t. Life was good, but a piece was missing from my puzzled life. At first it meant little, but the feeling grew larger until it was on my mind more than it used to be.

I hadn’t spoken to my parents for a year. They never bothered to call, so I felt no urge to call them. Until, one day while I was on a hunting trip with Uncle Ben. We had been out and roaming the woodland for hours upon hours with nothing more than a single turkey to show for the time we had spent.

“Are you thinking of heading back yet,” he would ask every so often, but I never had done anything like hunting back home.

“Not yet uncle,” I said. “Maybe we can find something around the bend.” We never did find anything more, but it was the thrill of finding something that kept both of us going until we began to head back.

As soon as we had done so, my aunt had news that my parents had called…for ME. I was dumbstruck and slightly bewildered that after all this time they finally wanted to talk to me.

I should have guessed what they had wanted, though. Apparently, they still felt I had a chance to make it into college, but I was sick and tired of hearing it. Life right there in Seattle was better than anything I had ever really experienced so far. I wasn’t ready to leave on a whim, so I hung up on my parent’s mid-way through the conversation.

They called again several days later and occasionally here and there within the next month. I talked about the situation with Robbie and Natalie, who were pretty confident that I was going to stay in Seattle. I was also confident, but something began to happen. Things my parents were saying started to make sense as I began to listen, and I doubted whether this life in Seattle along with all its good times, was just another phase that would fade away.

I couldn’t believe that I doubted the true friendship of Robbie and Natalie for the first time since I met them nearly a year ago. I was presented with an ultimatum: friends or possibly a brighter future. I bet most would say that they would easily choose college over friends, but it’s not as easy as that. These were the people that helped me out when I struggled and made me laugh when I was down. Was I just expected to throw all of the memories away and forget that they ever happened?

“Tomorrow we’re going to go fishing, just the three of us, down by Piper’s Creek and catch trout emptying into the Sound,” Natalie exclaimed as we walked across the street and into my apartment building. “It’ll be great, and we’ll have the whole place to ourselves. Well, we’ll see you later, Cal,” she shouted down the hallway.

I could tell they were excited and I was, too. But I knew already that I couldn’t go with them; I wouldn’t go because I had made up my mind, but it was too hard to tell them about my final decision. I took one last look at them as they left and I stood still wondering whether I had made the right choice or not.

The early morning mist that blew in from the Puget Sound covered the streets with an almost eerie atmosphere. The bell atop the back door to the café jingled as I stepped onto the cold pavement before me. In hand I had my bags. The rest of my things I would have shipped back to Pennsylvania later that month. I had made my decision to go back home and attend college because in my heart I knew it was the right thing to do.

It was too hard to tell either Robbie or Natalie that I was leaving, so I went into the morning as early as possible. And with that, I left Seattle without a trace except for the memories I had shared with those who got to know me. I assume that Natalie and Robbie knew where I was and where I planned to go, but I tried to not think about Seattle at all for fear of regret. It was another chapter in my life and every story has to end at some point.

I attended the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for four, seemingly endless and hard-working years to achieve my degree. I thought of my old friends less and less until I left the U.S. and settled in London to pursue a career in art. I married within a year and had a son the following year. Soon, all the memories had faded as if I had never experienced them.

I was living a perfectly fine life until my son brought out a dusty photo album one dreary day. I was older and I didn’t recognize any of it. Once I began thumbing through the pages, I realized it was a gift Natalie had made for me before I had vanished from Seattle nineteen years ago. After relating the story to my wife and son they urged me to go back to see what had become of the things I used to know and treasure. I was resistant at first, but I was curious enough that I was easily badgered into going.

I only asked one thing from my wife and son, which was to let me embark on the journey alone. I boarded my first plane in over fifteen years and set off to America. I was slightly emotional leaving the King County Airport terminal into Seattle, but I recollected myself and ventured onward.

The city itself was similar; a few updates had been made to make it more of an appealing city, but its overall appearance was the same. The first thing I needed to cover was the whereabouts of my friends from long ago. I asked a few locals if they knew where Natalie might be, but none of them knew anything. I was distraught, but persevered until I found her address in a local listings phonebook.

I felt awkward and a little fearful of what I would find beyond her front door, so I approached slowly. A tall man in a polo shirt answered while holding an infant bundled up in his arm. I asked for Natalie, and she instantly recognized me when she came to the door. I made sure that she had no hard feelings still bottled up from nineteen years ago. Then we caught up on events in our lives that we had missed while I was away.

She had been married for awhile and had three kids. I was happy to hear that her life was content and that she was a stay-at-home mother until her baby was a little older. I told her of my life during college, and how I left for London. I talked about where I’d been living and how extremely happy I was to be back in Seattle once more.

We were in high spirits during the conversation until I brought up Robbie’s name. I hadn’t known at the time, but Robbie had been hit by truck and died several weeks after I left. Natalie had tried to call or send letters telling me of his death, but I had become reclusive and ignored every attempt she had made.

I had mended part of my recovering heart, but I needed to fix the other half that was still broken. Both Natalie and I went to the cemetery, and I reconciled with Robbie spiritually at his grave. I left a bouquet of flowers upon his tombstone and walked away in peace. A heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders and I felt at one with everybody I had once known. I bid Natalie farewell later that day and began to drive my car around the city. The clouds had been grey almost all day and now it started to rain.

I had one last stop to make before I went back to the terminal. I turned around the corner and there it was in front of me. I pulled into the alley to park my car behind the building complex and opened my umbrella to shield myself from the downpour.

The café was deserted. It was now just another old, abandoned building trying to be leased for a moderate price. The front door was barred and the back door was boarded up with rotting wood and rusted nails. I easily ripped the loosely nailed planks from the door and entered the building. A decade of dust rose into the air in a frenzied manner as I sauntered up the creaky stairwell. Up through a flight of stairs and to my left I came upon another door at the end of the hallway. I looked down at a slip of paper in my hand and up again at the door.

“Room 102,” I stated solemnly. I used my key to open it up and peered inside.

The rusty hinges screeched as I forced the door open and entered. The empty room starred back at me the same way it had nearly twenty years ago when I first came to Seattle. I strode across the musty, shag carpeting toward the worn and scratched up window in the corner. I looked into the glass with a vacant expression while I listened to the rain. The downpour outside made me feel at peace; at peace with not only myself, but with the friends I had abandoned so long ago.

I felt comforted in the presence of the room, which had sheltered me for a year so long ago, and I shed a single tear along with a smile that began to spread across my face. And with that, I turned and left the building and Seattle for the very last time.