~Hericane~

Hana was contemplating a pink packet of saccharin while she eavesdropped on the other diner's conversations. As in most places where she stopped, they were talking about the weather.

"The weather man of channel eight said we are looking at another week in the one-twenties."

Hana accepted her eggs and bacon from the waitress with a sad smile. She sprinkled on the salt and pepper, and looked at the portrait of the desert framed by the window. She was in the middle of Death Valley and had stopped for breakfast at the "Last Chance for Food and Gas".

"I swear to god, if we didn't have air conditioning in here, we'd all by frying like sardines in a can. If we don't get some rain soon, this whole valley is going to be nothing but scorched earth."

She had left San Diego the day before with no clear destination in mind, only that she couldn't bare another second inside of her sterile home. She and John had both wanted to have many children, but after two miscarriages and three years of IVF treatments she had finally accepted that she was broken and would never be able to have children. John had said they could adopt, but she knew how important it was for him to see his own eyes looking out of his baby's face. She left because she was the broken piece of the family puzzle.

"The reservoir is 'bout to dry up, if we don't get rain soon there will be no water for the livestock."

She sliced the yoke with a toast corner and felt the first tear burning in the corner of her eye. Rather than trying to suppress it, she thought of the names of the children she would never have--Dennis, Irene, Ophelia, Vince and Katrina. When she thought of the name Katrina, she envisioned what her baby daughter would look like--big blue eyes just like her daddy and jet black hair. The first tear made a path to her collarbone that other tears began to follow.

"Looks like clouds are beginning to form over the mountains."

With the first tear set free, the others rushed to follow and soon she had a double line of tears coursing down each cheek. She was silently crying, the sub-sub's hadn't started yet, but she wasn't worried about creating a spectacle of herself in front of strangers. She knew they weren't paying any attention to her, they were looking out the window.

"Well I'll be god damned if it ain't raining!"

The first drops fell onto the tin roof where they sizzled like water in a deep fat fryer. After their entrance, bigger drops began to fall and soon the rain was sheeting down the windows and dancing on the hard baked earth. Four of the five diners at the "Last chance for Gas and Food" walked outside to tilt their faces towards the sky and allow the rain to wash the desert from their skin.

She couldn't allow herself to think about how happy the people were that it was raining, she needed to hold onto her grief and let it grow so that the rain would continue to fall. She knew that she was responsible for the rain.

It always rained when she cried.

She pulled a prescription bottle from her purse and fingered the cap. The pills inside were meant to suppress her "delusions of grandeur", but all they really did was numb her enough to stop the tears. It was true that when she took them she felt less responsible for the people affected by the drought of her not being there, and the people who drowned under the weight of her tears when she was there. But they also made her feel like a zombie.

At the age of four she thought her name was "No-NO Hana" but after hearing the Hawaiin legend of Noenoe Ua Kea O Hana, she realized that her parents were only calling her by some of her proper name, and that she was the embodiment of the girl who had been turned into a rain cloud by her father. They lived on Mount Waileaila and it was her grandmother who had told her the legend and ended with the words: "Take a nap now Maleah, and dream happy dreams so that when you waken the sun will be out and we can go to the beach."

At the age of ten her family had moved to Ocean Side California. During the first summer they went to Disneyland, and Sea World, and Knott's Berry Farm. She had a new best friend named Susan, and during that summer she was so happy that it never rained. During the Spring of the following year, Susan found a new best friend and Hana was left alone on the playground. Her tears had been so bitter that mudslides had taken out a section of the coast line. Because she was old enough to understand the concept of civic duty, she realized that she was responsible for every house that had been lost in the mudslides caused by her tears.

That was when she resolved to maintain happiness. While the families that belonged to the houses talked about all they had lost to the channel 3 anchor man, Hana was eating a banana split with her new best friend, and the rain stopped.

By the age of fourteen, Southern California was experiencing a drought and Hana knew that she had to be sad occasionally, just until the canals ran with water and all of the flowers bloomed. During the Spring months she lay in bed at night and thought of everything that would make her sad, like broken windows and puppies lost in drain pipes. As soon as the tears started forming in her eyes, the rain clouds would gather. She would fall asleep with light misty rains nourishing the land.

From the ages of 14-18, she took the time to be sad every spring so that the world would get the water that it needed. Her parents never asked her why she was said, they never asked her why she was happy either. They were busy with their own lives and they never seemed to understand that their daughter could control the weather.

At the age of 24 she married John--it was a beautiful June day without a cloud in the sky--but over the subsequent years there had been many rain storms. After the second miscarriage, John had thought that a trip to Mexico would cheer her up. Instead, her tears had been so bitter that a village was flooded and all of the little cardboard shacks were buried in the mud. The realization that she had wiped out an entire village was so intense that she fell into a depression that wouldn't be comforted by John's words that they could try again and they would have a houseful of babies.

She explained to him that she wasn't crying because of the baby she was crying because of the village that had been destroyed by her grief. He contacted their family practitioner and suggested that she take a few days at a local mental health facility. The doctor suggested that many women fell into a depression after losing a baby, and that a rest and some medication would be all that she needed.

After many sessions with her psychiatrist, she confessed her secret power over the rain and he had added the little white pills to her daily diet and admitted her to the facility for a more lengthy stay. Her mother had come to visit her and told her that it was all her grandmother's fault that she had the lunatic notion about the rain. She told her to stop telling such crazy stories so that she could go home. After three days of taking the pills she met with her counselor and he remarked that it hadn't rained in three days, and he asked her how she was feeling. She replied that she felt tired and blurry. He asked her if the foggy weather was caused by her blurry emotions and she used her mother's advice when she replied, "Of course not."

She didn't bother to explain that she caused rain, not fog. When she left the facility, she understood that she could never again admit to her power. She also felt rather proud of herself for all of the green that she saw, her previous weeks of crying and shed so much water that the residents of San Diego were able to water their lawns, fill their swimming pools and wash their cars.

Two months after being releases, she missed her period. She bought five home pregnancy kits and all confirmed that she was pregnant. She stopped taking her medication for fear of what it would do to her unborn child. The doctor confirmed her glorious news and for three weeks she imagined Katrina forming tiny fingers and itty bitty toes as cute as corn niblets. She woke every morning to her sun filled room and she would place her hands over her still flat stomach and sing lullabies. When she went grocery shopping, she bought packages of diapers and baby bottles. She began painting the nursery, she planned an under-the-sea theme complete with a mural of dolphins and angel fish.

She was buying glow-in-the dark stars to attach to ceiling of the nursery when her period started.

So did the rain.

She traded the stars for maxi-pads and left the store knowing that her tears would cause all of California to slip into the ocean. When she got onto the Interstate she didn't know where she was heading, just that she couldn't face her sterile house or the empty nursery.

She finished her breakfast and then considered the bottle of pills that would give her the blurry feeling that neither hurt nor pleased. Her intention had been to take a little sabbatical with her pills and her broken heart, but the reaction of the diner at the "Last Chance for Food and gas" gave her a better idea. It was a horrible twist of fate that she couldn't carry a baby to term, but with her ability to bring the rain she was the epitome of fertility. Every desert that she traveled through would bloom.

The pride that she felt in that moment was big enough to squash the emptiness of her childless arms. She got up from her booth and went to the restroom where she popped the top off the bottle and dumped all of the little white pills into the toilet. She knew that her husband, and parents, and doctors would be disappointed by her actions, but there were children all over the world living in drought conditions and she alone had the power to change their lives.

When she walked out of the restroom she caught sight of the diners laughing and celebrating the rain and she had to think of think of her baby names to damper the buzz of joy that would stop the rain.

She approached the waitress at the cash register with tears trembling behind her eyelashes. The waitress accepted her credit card and swiped it through the machine.

"Look at those damn fools out there, you'd think they never saw rain before I told them it was going to rain this week, weather man of channel six has been talking about the El Nina all week."

Hana walked to her car and avoided eye contact with the patrons enjoying the deluge. She thought of baby Katrina and decided that she wouldn't call John until she reached New Orleans.