The Silence Between Raindrops

By Habib

It starts with the rain.

It always does, these days. Not in the grand, cinematic sense the thunder, the wind but the smallness of it. The hush as it begins. The way it taps gently against the windows of my father’s room in the care home, like it’s trying to speak before it forgets how.

He doesn’t speak much anymore.

At first, it was occasional confusion. Misplaced names. Telling me the same story twice in a row. Then came the days when he’d stare past me, like he was watching another version of me behind my shoulder some younger, smaller ghost he remembered better. And now, here we are. Room 214. The beige recliner. The small television always tuned to something he doesn't watch. A man hollowed out by time.

I visit on Sundays. I bring him the crossword from the paper and a muffin from the bakery on Hawthorne Street the same kind he used to buy me when I was a kid. Blueberry. He doesn’t eat it now, but he’ll hold it in his lap like it matters.

Outside, the rain falls in careful rhythms. Inside, my father’s breath mirrors it. Shallow. Steady. Familiar. And then, suddenly, he says something.

"She used to wait for the kettle to whistle before she'd speak."

His voice startles me. It always does, when it surfaces from the depths of whatever ocean he’s floating in.

"Who did, Dad?" I ask gently.

He doesn’t answer. He turns to the window, and I follow his gaze. The garden outside is wilting, the late autumn flowers giving in to the cold. I think he’s gone quiet again, returned to that unreachable place where memory crumbles. But then he speaks again.

"Your mother," he says. "Every morning. I’d be rambling on about bills or the car, and she’d stand by the stove, quiet, waiting. Then that kettle would scream like a train and only then would she talk."

I stare at him. His voice is still rough, but there’s a clarity in it I haven’t heard in months. A precision. A memory, intact.

"I forgot that" he says softly. "I loved this."

A lump forms in my throat. “Tell me more.”

He doesn’t, not right away. Instead, he closes his eyes. For a second I think he’s drifted off again, but then he begins to hum. Not a tune I know. Just a low, aimless melody.

When I was eight, he’d hum while brushing my hair after baths. That same strange tune. When I was sixteen and full of rage, I told him it was annoying. He stopped, immediately. I hadn’t heard it since until now.

"She’s gone, is not she?" he asks, without opening his eyes.

I nod, though I don’t know if he can see me.

"Yes, Dad. Almost four years now."

"Four." He chews on the word. "That long."

He reaches for the muffin on his lap, his fingers shaking as they brush against the wax paper. He doesn’t pick it up. Just rests his hand on it, like it’s grounding him.

“You used to love blueberry muffins,” he says. “We’d sit on that bench outside the library. You’d eat yours too fast and always get sick.”

I laugh. “Yeah. Every single time.”

"I told you to slow down. You never did." A faint smile. "Stubborn. Like your mom."

There’s a silence then not the empty kind, but the full kind. The kind that hums with everything unsaid. The kind that lives between raindrops, between memories, between the spaces in a life shared.

I’m sorry I forget things, he whispers.

I reach for his hand. “I’ll remember them for you.”

He nods, almost imperceptibly. Outside, the rain begins to slow. The sun threatens to break through the clouds.

And in that quiet space, I sit with my father. I don’t rush to fill the silence. I let it breathe.

Because sometimes, it’s not about what we remember but the grace of remembering together.