The Cadence of Rain by Erin Popelka

Today is my favorite shift of the year: New Year’s Day. The passengers that ride my bus are mostly quiet; last night’s partygoers have found another way home. It’s just the morning route and the Oregon rain and that inkling of hope, the dawning of a new year. Maybe this year will be better. 

On New Year’s Day, I allow myself one luxury. I’ll play the radio, just loud enough so that I can hear it. I tune it on the only station that’s still playing Christmas music. It keeps me company on today’s quiet route.

Growing up, Ma always listened to Christmas music on New Year’s Day while she was taking down decorations. She’d have us kids help, all seven of us, and we sang along. Even when we got old enough to want to get out of the house, we stayed home that day. Ma would bake cookies after lunch, a celebration for having put away ornaments and lights and her grandmother’s porcelain Nativity scene. Then she’d watch her favorite movie one last time before it, too, went in the box: White Christmas. Bing Crosby was her favorite.

The traffic light turns from green to yellow, and I slow the bus. I stop as it turns red. The rhythm of the windshield wipers offers a beat behind my music. The hiss of the wiper motor. The thud of the blades. My bus is empty for the moment. Never know how long it’ll last.

The light turns, and I ease forward. I slow at the stop, check for anyone running to catch up. No one. I keep going. 

I cross the Burnside Bridge. The Willamette River is dark and high. I lumber into the turn onto 5th Avenue, careful with the parked cars. There’s a girl, a teenager maybe, at my next stop. 

As I get closer, I take a good look at her. The first thing I notice is the hair. It’s light brown, and it must be cut jagged or something, because she’s got it pulled back, but it still manages to erupt from her head like some kind of spray. I don’t know how that’s possible. She’s wearing all black: a leather jacket, black work boots. Dark eye makeup against pale white skin. As I stop, I realize she’s younger than I’d guessed. Maybe only twelve. 

When she gets on, I see that the leather jacket is cheap plastic, and it’s already cracking in places. She’s carrying a backpack, but it’s a little kid backpack. It has sequins on it, pinks and purples. A relic from a childhood that didn’t end so long ago. 

She pulls her hand from her jacket pocket and flashes a transfer. I nod, “You’re all set.” She must have gotten up really early if this is her second bus of the day.

I expect her to go to the far back. The kids do that, they’ll go to the seats against the engine, slump down, their arms across their chest, their feet up high on the seat in front of them. She doesn’t. She sits as close to me as she can get, right behind my chair. There’s a plastic wall between us, but that’s it.

I check for passing traffic and put my foot on the gas.

The radio switches from a commercial to the song I know better than any other, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” This was the one where all us kids knew every word. My sisters would get the hairbrush they shared and sing into it, like a microphone. When I was little, I’d try to mess them up, to make them laugh while they sang along. My youngest sister always kept singing, even after everyone else had moved on. I could always make her laugh, and she’d have to start the song over again.

“We didn’t get a white Christmas this year,” the girl says.

“It’s Portland. We don’t often get white Christmases.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

In the rearview mirror, she’s leaned forward. She concentrates on the ground in front of her, her chest against her legs, her feet tip-toed. She’s like a ballerina in that pose.

The light ahead turns from green to yellow. Sometimes there’s good luck hitting the lights. Sometimes not. I stop. The bus is quiet without the road noise underneath, with the engine rumbling all the way in the back.

“Your first Christmas in Portland?”

“Last one.”

I consider my route. We’ve already passed the Amtrak and the Greyhound stations. If she’s a runaway, there’s not much I can do other than pay close attention to her features and watch the alerts later on. 

“Leaving town?” I ask.

She sits up, and I can’t see her face anymore, just her legs coming down to the floor.

The traffic light turns, and I drive on. The rev of the engine overwhelms the silence.

I expect to see her pull a phone out of her backpack. She doesn’t. She just sits, waiting, as we go through a green light, as I slow at another empty stop, then keep driving. 

“White Christmas” ends. Next up, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

“Why are you listening to Christmas music?”

If she’d sat anywhere else, she wouldn’t be able to hear it. I stop at another red light. “You don’t like Christmas music?”

She leans forward, and I can see her face again. Her eyes are hard to read, smeared with all that black makeup, but her face is a child’s face. Her body so small, even wrapped in black. She looks up at me, and I can see green eyes. Big. Sad.

“I think it’s a bunch of sappy garbage. What’s Christmas but people spending too much on things that don’t matter, corporations keeping us distracted so we can get through another winter?”

“You didn’t get what you wanted under the tree?” 

She laughs. It’s a little kid sound, too high-pitched, a laugh that breaks through her attitude. She looks down and covers her mouth. She knows I was joking. 

The light turns, and I accelerate through the intersection. “I only choose the Christmas music station on New Year’s Day,” I say. “My Ma did the same thing every year when I was a kid.”

Her eyes find mine in the mirror. “You don’t look like the sappy type.”

“Too cranky?”

“No.”

“Too old, then. Or too fat.”

“You just seem, I don’t know, more wise.”

I was never the smart one. My youngest sister got her masters degree in something useless, Sociology or Anthropology or something. She’s teaching at a community college now, though, and I’m driving a bus. 

“If you say so,” I tell the girl.  

“I’m going to visit my Mom today. I guess we’re both saying ‘hi.’ You with your music, and me…” She looks out the side window, and what little morning light we have through the rainclouds casts a glow on her face.

Her expression is too vulnerable. I look away.

At the end of downtown, I get a few more passengers. I kneel the bus for the older white woman with the plastic over her hair. She climbs up and flashes her senior card. A Black high school kid with a skateboard gets on. An Asian man in a dark coat. We cross the Ross Island Bridge, head back to the east side of the river.

It doesn’t take long to get past the close-in hipster coffee shops, the Aladdin Theater, the fancy florist. Then we settle in for the residential houses, the convenience stores, the gas stations. More folks come on, folks go off. 

The girl stays quiet, looking out the window. I keep glancing at her face, memorizing it, just in case. I keep waiting for her to get off at one of these neighborhood stops. I hope it’s a nice one in Woodstock, by the golf course. As we get to 82nd and the used car dealerships, I’m less optimistic.

It’s only me and the girl on the bus when I have to stop for my mandated break. The end of the route is a little further, but there’s no bathroom. So the route pauses here, under I-205. 

“I gotta break for twenty minutes. You staying on?”

“I’ll get off at the end of the line.”

It’s a strange place for her to get out. There are middle-class houses on one side, and Willamette National Cemetery on the other. Houses like that, the moms don’t send their kids on the bus early in the morning on New Year’s Day. 

She’s visiting her mom at the cemetery. I meet her eyes in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry, kid.”

She pulls her knees to her chest, and I can’t see her in the mirror anymore.

My last Christmas with Ma, she didn’t know what was going on. Her hospice bed was in the living room, and she just looked out the window. Grandkids ran all around her. My siblings bustled in the kitchen. We ate on paper plates in our laps. 

When people were starting to pack up, I put on White Christmas. Ma looked over at the television, at the opening scenes with World War II soldiers celebrating Christmas Eve with rubble in the foreground and explosions in the background. I reached over and held her hand. Her mouth moved when Bing Crosby started to sing. 

I spend the break outside, standing under I-205. The traffic above me takes hold of my senses: tires humming, vehicles vibrating against concrete and up through my feet.  

The girl doesn’t leave the bus. 

At the end of the route, she pulls the cord for the cemetery. I stop and open the door.

“Thanks. Happy New Year.” She walks down the steps. Then she pauses, looks back. “Hey, Mister?”

“Yeah?”

“I know you just took a break, but do you think you could take another one?”

She looks up the hill towards the grassy incline, dimpled with flat stones. The passenger seats are all empty. I consider if it’s okay for me to be alone with this young girl. 

As an answer, a car pulls into the cemetery. We wouldn’t be alone.

I close and lock the door. I pull open the back hatch, revealing the engine. This is the TriMet signal. Whenever drivers need a minute, for any reason, we just say we’re having mechanical issues. We take as long as we need. 

Her steps are shorter than mine, but she moves easily, walking up the hill as fast as she’d walk on flat sidewalk. It doesn’t take long before I’m out of breath. 

Neither of us speak. 

At the welcome building at Willamette National Cemetery, she heads toward a granite wall of interred ashes. Metal circles with cones jut out from a few of them; none hold flowers. Tree branches shade us from some of the rain. A few more cars are parked out front.

She ducks into a garden. It has a clear plexiglass roof but is surrounded by open air windows and rhododendron bushes.  

She sits down on a bench. I sit on the other side, and we listen to raindrops on the plexiglass, a cadence to the silence. 

“When did your mom pass away?” I ask.

“Three years ago. I’ve lived with different family members ever since. My grandma in Salem. Then my great-aunt here in Portland. Next week I’ll move to be with an aunt and cousins in Iowa.”

My breath comes in clouds in front of my face. “Your mom’s buried here?”

“No. But this is the easiest place to get to. And it’s pretty.”

I rub my hands to keep them warm. “My Ma died ten years ago today,” I say.

“I’m glad you have the Christmas music, then. And a new year,” she says. 

I look over and smile at her. “You’ll get a white Christmas in Iowa.” 

“I’m dreaming…” She sings Bing Crosby’s song, soft, slow, just like my sister with her hairbrush.

I join in on the second line about how I used to know them. Those Christmases. And I did.

Neither of us pick up the next lyric. Instead, our voices drop, replaced by a car in the distance, the shrill of a single birdsong, the creak of the bench. Raindrops staccato against the plexiglass, light at first, then heavier, until its drumming is everything. All that’s left is the rain.

Erin Popelka is a reader, writer, and the founder of Must Read Fiction. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Threepenny Review, Puerto del Sol, and Berkeley Fiction Review, among others. As founder of Must Read Fiction, she facilitates an online community of readers, including author interviews and book giveaways. https://erinpopelka.com/