THE WHISPER OF THE RAIN
Brooklyn Shepard

         It was a stark and unforgiving mid-winter’s evening in western Oregon. This was my second time in Corvallis in a week. The light from the Shari’s sign reflected off our faces, casting a morbid glow on the pavement. Sitting on the ground of a rain-soaked parking lot, I held Jason’s uncalloused hand as he bled to death. The dark rivulets spreading out from his body were growing into a puddle, somehow avoiding the place where I sat, as if they too blamed me for their presence.

          “I . . . I think I got shot,” Jason spoke quietly.

         Three days prior, my daughter had called me, hysterical on the phone, blubbering out, “He hit me.” I already wasn’t fond of Jason Williams. While my daughter, Cha’uri, felt he was a mature and distinguished older guy, I just saw him as the nearly thirty-year-old who was dating my barely legal daughter. I may have been able to get past that, but he had been accused of molesting his much-younger sister when she was a baby, and he was all too often around my infant granddaughters. When my youngest granddaughter was born to Cha’uri and Jason, the Department of Health and Human Services stepped in and refused to let Nova go home with him. They called me early on the second morning of my daughter’s hospital stay and asked if I would take the girls until Jason completed a psychosexual parameters test. We didn’t expect that he would refuse, but he did.

        At the time of the incident, I was living in Forest Grove, a tiny agricultural town two hours north of Corvallis. It was a harshly beautiful night. There was no moon out, and the stars glinted hard like chips of quartz freshly dug out of their earth. The highway was lonely, and headlights spit their beams through my windshield in stark bursts breaking up long periods of darkness. During my frantic drive south, Cha’uri and Jason had the ill grace to make up, and she sent me a text right before I left the interstate telling me to turn around. She tried to assure me that she was fine; it was all a big misunderstanding. But once a plate is broken, no amount of glue can put it back exactly the same as it was before.
           I convinced her to meet up with me, and we talked, but she decided not to go home with me, to stay instead with Jason. No amount of my considerable persuasion could change her mind. She was definitely my daughter. Stubborn as a mule. I couldn’t let it go. My boyfriend of the time, an ex-Army grunt, pitched one solution that would remove Jason from ever being a problem again. If the United States Armed Forces is good at anything, it’s at training its recruits that killing another person is a solution to most problems.
      The next day, I offered to meet up with Cha’uri and Jason for dinner, saying I had something to talk to Jason about. I never intended to have a conversation with him. Upon arriving at the Shari’s Saturday evening, I expressed a desire to smoke, and predictably, as smokers will do, my daughter and Jason followed outside, bumming smokes off me as we huddled under the bicycle rack out of the rain. 
         I stepped away to drop my filter in the receptacle, and the first shot ricocheted off the bike rack and hit me in the knee. No plan survives the first attempt, and my plan was already going awry. The shots came from across the parking lot, in the wooded area near the cars, and the pops from the gunfire were so loud and so close together that they sounded like fireworks going off in the space between us. I fell to the ground, and saw my daughter, still standing, staring agape at Jason, who lay on the ground behind me. I screamed at Cha’uri to get down, honestly afraid for the first time. What would I do if she got hurt? She dropped and scrambled over to me on hands and knees. I checked her quickly, desperately making sure she wasn’t injured, then shoved her inside the glass-walled entrance to the diner. The door chimed, an incongruous welcoming noise. I crawled over to Jason. He lay on his back, several small red marks scattered across his body, like he had been dotted with a red Sharpie. I could see that none were immediately fatal, but it wouldn’t be long. Suddenly, this wasn’t what I wanted at all. Death, right in front of you, goes from being a distant, sterile concept, to being a real and present event.
         “I . . . I think I got shot,” Jason whispered to me. I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me.

      “You’re going to be fine,” I lied. There was no reason to frighten him. It would be pointlessly cruel.
          Both of our lives were fading away like the last light from the sky. While he would never hit my daughter again, I hadn’t saved her. I had cost her both her own free will in her relationship choices, and her time with her mother. As I watched her through the plate glass window, safe within the restaurant, I realized I would spend most of the foreseeable future unable to hold her when she needed me or be by her side as she celebrated life. Our lives would be as they were in this moment: me on the outside, watching her, and all too often doing so through glass.
         The police and ambulance arrived in minutes. It didn’t take the detectives long to arrest my boyfriend and me. I was treated at the Corvallis hospital for a superficial gunshot wound to the knee, and released into the custody of a detective of the Corvallis Police Department. After spending eight months in the county’s ancient and derelict jail, my co-defendant and I were each sentenced to prison time for our roles in Jason’s death. I received eighteen years, and he got twenty-five to life. It could have been worse. I’ve been at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility for a little over eight years. The time has passed quickly, but I’ve missed so much of my life outside of these walls.
         My granddaughters are now nine and eight years old. Like them, I’ve learned and grown. Most importantly perhaps, I have learned that no one has the right to take life from someone else. It is possibly the only thing we own that is ours alone. The ending of a life is a lot like strong perfume. It’s impossible to put it on someone else without getting a little on yourself. My freedom died with Jason that night in the parking lot, our funeral dirge the whisper of the rain.