From the writing prompt, “The roof was leaking.” This story is set farther along in the Springfield timeline than most of the others.
It had been raining now for seven days straight. Jean Knockings brushed her hair from her face and stood from the dirt floor she’d been sleeping on. She made her way to the door of the hut and looked out at the steaming jungle. The air was so thick with moisture that it felt like a wet cloth pressed against her skin. The smell of wet animal hide radiated from the walls of the hut; it would make her stomach turn if she hadn’t grown used to it months before.
The roof was leaking. The soft drip drip drip of water hitting the ground behind her played an odd counterpoint to the insistent tap tap tap of the rain beating against the sides of the hut. She knew that if she turned to look, she’d be able to see a puddle of water directly in the middle of the packed dirt floor where the rain was leaking through the hole in the alpaca skin at the pinnacle of the roof.
In a weird way, she envied that skin. The idea of being able to gouge a hole and let all the accumulated pressure in her mind pour out was more than a little appealing. After seven days, she knew this place so well that she could literally see it with her eyes closed. With absolutely perfect recall. There were days when Jean truly hated having this ability to remember everything she saw. Sometimes, she thought forgetting would be easier.
No, she admitted to herself, not sometimes. All the time.
Remembering was hard. Especially on days like this one, in weeks like this one, where she had to sit still and just wait for whatever weather crisis or local custom was currently blocking her path to blow through so she could continue on her quest. She snorted softly to herself. Quest was too civilized a word, though one she liked better. Hunt was more appropriate. A hunt for the man who had done so much damage to so many people. The man that had sent her brother to his death and left his body on the floor.
Doctor Aakil Sarin was out there somewhere, and Jean hated sitting still. After six months of being on his tail—six months of near-misses, of dashed hopes, of travel through so many countries that anyone but her would have lost count—she’d finally tracked him down to Sao Paulo in Brazil. In retrospect she should have come here first; in a lot of ways, this place was the genesis of Sarin’s madness. She supposed that in a way, it probably felt like home to him.
She’d been so close this time. Practically close enough to taste the end of her long and so far fruitless chase. She’d even seen Sarin; seen his eyes widen in recognition, seen him flee across the crowded street and into the waiting cart before she could stop him or even speak. She could see the smug smile on his face with crystal clarity when she closed her eyes, even though she’d only spotted it for a fraction of a second before the cart whisked him off towards the mountains.
The mountains where she was now stuck, waiting for the rain to stop so she could continue on her search once again.
Jean still didn’t know what she was going to do when she caught up with Sarin. What was she supposed to do to the man who’d killed her twin, who’d manipulated them both for so long that she couldn’t ever remember a time when he hadn’t had a hand in their lives?
She remembered once, when she and John were five and John had just stolen yet another of her favorite toys, that their mother had taken Jean in her lap and rocked her softly while she cried. “You have to learn how to forgive and forget, Jean.”
Jean remembered her little girl self staring up into her mother’s eyes with bewilderment. “I can’t forget, Momma. I don’t know how.”
Her mother’s expression had been one of understanding; looking back on it now, knowing what kind of man Mr. Knockings had been, Jean wondered just how much of that was empathy, because then she’d said, “Then you’re gonna have to try twice as hard to forgive people, sweetie. Because if you don’t, you’ll get eaten up on the inside. Sometimes, with John, you just have to let things go, like water out of a sieve. How much can you hold before you burst?”
Jean’s brown eyes refocused absently into the present and she blinked quickly to hold back the tears that threatened. She hadn’t cried since she found John’s body on the floor of his office. Not once in six months. “Now what, Momma?” she whispered to no one. “How can I forgive what I can’t forget?”
So many things engraved forever into her mind’s eye: thirty-two years of life with John forever half a step in front of her, underhanded deals she’d been forced time and time again to concede to, a thousand arguments with her brother that she’d never won. And the look on John’s face, that cocky smile that used to hate so much but that she now missed so much it ached. The look he’d had the very last time she’d seen him alive, when he’d walked out the door after she’d told him that she never wanted to see him again.
Famous last words. Ones that she couldn’t ever erase, now that he was dead.
The last living Knockings looked up and watched as a drop of water collected on the torn piece of skin at the apex of the roof, solidified into a drop, and fell into the puddle on the mud floor. Like water out of a sieve.
And all at once, Jean’s impressively brilliant mind finally came to the conclusion that maybe–just maybe–forgiveness wasn’t about forgetting at all. Maybe forgiveness was just letting something leak out to puddle on the floor so you could step over it and move on.
For the first time in six months, Jean let herself feel. And as soon as she did, the tears began to fall.
Drip drip drip.
In the middle of a rainstorm in the jungle of Brazil, in a tiny animal-skin hut with a leaking roof, Jean Knockings cried. She cried and cried until she couldn’t breath, until even she had lost count of the tears, and she mourned her brother. She cried for the way John had died, and for the way he’d lived. She cried for the betrayal of their family by Aakil Sarin…and as she finally began to breathe again, she found herself crying for the doctor himself. Because his life was a dark and bitter one, and he’d never had a family, not like she’d had.
When she finally straightened again, the rain hadn’t lessened. But she took a deep breath of the damp air…and smiled. She knew what she’d do now, when she caught up with Sarin.
She’d forgive him. And maybe, someday, she could forgive her brother, too. Because the bitterness and the heartache had spilled out of her a little, like water out of a sieve. Like the leaking roof above her head. Drip drip drip.
Jean didn’t have to forget. She just had to let it go in little drops until she could leave it behind. Maybe, someday, when the pressure in her head had cleared, she might even be able to forgive herself.
She could wait. With a long sigh, Jean sat back down on the dirt floor and watched the rain leak through the roof.
