It didn’t happen all at once. It was slow and by degrees, like the warmth of the day escaping into the atmosphere until your skin prickles and the short hairs on your arm stand on end, sounding an alarm that is has become cold without you noticing. That’s how it went with Dustin.
I suspect most eulogies start the same. We remember this person as a happy and carefree child. I knew it was a cliché, but I wrote it anyway. The bounce in his step that made his head bob when he walked, the flash of white teeth when he told one of his dry jokes. It was no lie. It wasn’t even a bend of the truth.
When I got the call I was in class - Differential Equations II. Dustin has been in an accident. My mother struggled to say much more. I found out later Dustin had left the highway and slammed into a tree. He hadn’t been speeding. He wasn’t drunk. He was dead when the ambulance arrived.
When I wrote the eulogy I started at the beginning, or at least from when my memories kicked in. Dustin was older than me by three years. He was to me what an older brother should be - protector, teacher, and entertainer. He was the happy and promising child. Everyone did like him. Another damn cliché.
And then there were growing pains. He broke up with a girlfriend. He was pushed into accepting a redundancy package at his job. His wish of saving a house deposit turned into an unclimbable mountain. His head didn’t bob when he walked anymore and he told fewer jokes until he stopped altogether. I didn’t include any of that. No one reminisces the bad times when you say goodbye.
At the funeral there was talk about falling asleep at the wheel and the angle of the sun and the types of animals sometimes seen bounding across the roads. I didn’t think so. Writing the eulogy told me that something had been wrong, something we all let slide. I felt it deep in my gut. I wished to go back and sit by his side and find words to help.
I didn’t cry when I gave the eulogy. I thought I would. What didn’t come when I was on the podium burst free when I stepped outside and saw his friends and classmates and colleagues crowded in the parking lot because there was no more room in the chapel. Such is the measure of a person.
There isn’t much to say after watching your brother, your son, your grandson, your friend, dropped into the earth. We sat silent in my grandparent’s living room, our black jackets hung over chairs and the top buttons of our shirts unfastened.
I was tired - exhausted - but I couldn’t stay. The air hung heavy in the room. And there was something else I couldn’t describe, something I couldn’t put a name to. It pressed on me from every direction. I felt it first when I stepped out of the chapel and it hadn’t lifted since.
I drove home in the growing dark. The small town roads were quiet and the trees lining them inescapable. How long until the trees don’t remind me of Dustin?
I slowed as I approached the small port town that marked the start of the highway to the city. It was there I saw it. At first I took it as rising smoke caused by a fire in a field somewhere far off against the red twilight sky. And then it took shape. Broad and menacing and growing ever larger, the rain cloud swept across the sky with unnatural speed. At the front edge, fingers of darkness reached out and smothered the light and soon the sky was black.
The first drop of rain hit the bonnet of the car like a bullet. I jumped and my heart gave a thump. And then the skies opened. All at once a deafening tat-tat-tat on the roof. This was no mere shower. This was apocalyptic, end of the world rain.
I pulled over to the side and stopped the car and turned off the engine. I closed my eyes and listened. The rain beat on the car like a drum. The sound vibrated through my skull and into my brain. The intensity of the noise was unrelenting. For a moment I could not conjure a set of circumstances that would bring it to an end.
I opened my eyes. Fat drops ricocheted off the bonnet by the light of the dashboard. Outside it was full dark.
And then, as quickly as it had began, the rain ceased. Smatterings of stars shone through breaks in the dark clouds. I turned on the engine and continued.
I reached the highway and the road was bone dry. No sign of rain. I passed the place where Dustin had come from the road and wondered if they would erect a plaque one day. I hoped they wouldn’t.
When I made it to my apartment I took the box from the back seat and lugged it inside. My mother had gathered up a few of Dustin’s things and put them in the box for me to take. Inside were books and printed photographs of us together. I smiled as I flicked the photos onto the table one by one. We looked alike - everyone said so.
As the photos stacked up on the table, the echoes of the rain played inside my head. A humming background noise where there should be none. A static from which I could not escape.
In the bottom of the box lay a notebook. It had a plain black cover and was bound by thin metal spirals. I pinched the spine with one hand and flicked through the pages. A loose sheet fell from the book and onto the floor. I picked it up.
A single sheet of unlined white paper. Etched in black was a shadowy form, broad and menacing and with thin fingers stretching out. It was the same form the rain cloud had taken, represented exactly here by Dustin’s hand.
At the bottom Dustin had scrawled a message and when I read it I dropped the paper to the floor.
It brings the rain. It rains inside my head now.