There was a storm sailing in low over Scranton. Billowing just below the level of the upper clouds, it came, swallowing up the sunlight as it went and dragging behind it the kind of peace and calm that only come in anticipation of the rain. The harsh, unlovely desolation of the spring city melted away; although the people who hurried down the streets of Scranton had their heads down, and were far too busy to notice the edges of things softening around them, or the rising wind that pulled at their shoelaces and coats.
Pam blinked as the same wind tugged at her curls, blowing them sideways into her eyes. She shifted her sketchbook on her knees and reached up to tug the unruly strands back behind her ears, wishing as she did so for the sensible barrette she’d worn to work that day. Jim, with Kelly’s help, had made her take it out for a ‘fashion show’, and the look in his eyes had made her feel so warm and golden, so she hadn’t put it back in again; when she’d arrived home Roy had told her he liked her hair the old way, and she was starting to agree with him, too late, now that the barrette was lying on her desk at work.
Those thoughts just kept chasing each other around the inside of her head – Jim’s smile and Roy’s disapproval, the old and the new, and it got too confusing so Pam stopped thinking about it and focused on the sky instead. The tiny house she shared with Roy had a porch; it was cramped and grimy and partially obscured by the big willow in the neighbor’s yard, but it was still a porch. And anything was better than being inside on a night like this.
This was Pam’s favorite kind of night, when the wind bowed the grass and shook green leaf-showers from the willow, and the clouds filled the horizon, drenched in the colors of silence and sleep. She shifted the sketchbook in her lap so that it rested on her knees again, and gently twirled the charcoal stick between her fingers, watching the black smears come off on her hands. She thought about trying for color, about mixing a green deep enough to paint the willow’s leaves or a blue rich enough to capture the first tints of sunset; but she was feeling conservative tonight, tired and calm, and in the end nothing captured her outlook on life like shades of gray.
The sliding glass door clattered open behind her, interrupting the wind-fallen silence, and heavy footsteps approached in time to the faint pounding that had started at the base of her skull. “Hey, Pammy,” Roy said from somewhere above and behind her. “What’re you doing out here?”
“Drawing,” Pam answered simply, smearing a charcoal-dusted finger across the first page of her sketchbook. It was new, a birthday present from Jim. She glanced up at the storm, which was wallowing low on the horizon like the sails of a ship heavy in the water.
“Drawing what? There’s nothing out here,” Roy commented, puzzled as he always was when he tried to Take an Interest in her life or her art.
“Clouds,” Pam answered. The first roll of thunder broke over them, long and slow, raising goosebumps on Pam’s arms that reminded her of a certain warm, low laugh.
Roy scratched his head, and Pam didn’t need to turn around to picture his shrug of resignation, his raised eyebrow. “Wasn’t that what you were doing last night? I mean, aren’t you tired of it?” Pam didn’t answer, and after a while he said “Whatever, just don’t sit out here in the rain all night,” and went back inside.
Pam just went back to scanning the horizon through the willow branches. What could she tell him? That the clouds changed every night, every minute even, and to draw them exactly as they were was impossible, because they wouldn’t stay still long enough, so she never got bored? That she liked the way the lines blended into each other, the way shapes slipped into other shapes and the whole thing never really made sense? That it reminded her of her own soul hung out against the sky – full of doubt and insecurity and never quite clear enough?
That drawing storm clouds was something she did because she was too old to go chasing fireflies and too scared to let her hair down once in a while?
She absentmindedly smoothed her curls back into place, and remembered the events of that day. She quickly redrew the mental portrait of her life to include Jim, and his unsettling habit of ignoring things like ‘can’t’ and ‘won’t’ and ‘shouldn’t’, and suddenly everything looked – not brighter, but deeper, with more shadows etched in and clouds crosshatched up above. More detailed, more real…
And suddenly there he was, in her mind’s eyes, terrifying in the intensity of his laid-back smiles and the emotions lying dormant in the space behind his eyes. But those weren’t thoughts she could deal with today, so she sighed and pushed them aside, concentrating instead on the blank white page before her. As she started to work, the familiar thoughtless clarity spread through her crowded mind like a measure of music in a silent room. She let the day fall away, like the leaves drifting down from the willow tree; all of the anger and irritation left over from Michael saying too much and Roy saying too little and Jim not saying anything at all.
Every few months or so, Kelly would come into the office babbling about some celebrity’s new technique for meditation or Kabala or some other idiot scheme like that; for Pam, nothing worked half as well as drawing the endless variations of a summer storm. It was her way of blowing off steam… that thought caught her attention, and made her smile. Hadn’t she read somewhere – Shakespeare, maybe – that the clouds were made of lovers’ sighs? (Of course, she didn’t love anyone, because she was engaged, but still…)
Lately, she had been praying for thundershowers and rain, because this time with her sketchbook and the sky was the only time that felt normal or right or safe. It was the only time she felt she could trust anything – her best friend, her fiancé, even herself. Especially herself.
Roy hated days like these, when the sun showed up late or not at all; rain was bad for the sports that he loved to play and watch, that Pam never bothered to keep track of. Sunny days were for basketball or baseball, for pick-up games (she sat on the sidelines) and barbeques in the sticky heat when he would get drunk and loud and obnoxious – every gorgeous sunny summer weekend, like clockwork, without fail.
For Pam, blue skies were boring, routine, and raw, like harsh sunlight in her eyes and raucous laughter in her ears. But storms… well, sometimes you needed a little subtlety, and a little shading, a little crosshatching under the stark straight lines of life. Sometimes you needed a little change… or an excuse to stay indoors, playing pranks on your annoying co-workers all day with your ingenious partner in crime.
The truth was, Roy didn’t notice anything, which was fine, really. Except, if he couldn’t notice the graceful swoop and curl of an approaching storm, then he couldn’t really be expected to notice the perfect hue of a painted tree she’d worked on for hours, or her favorite kind of flowers, or anything else.
Most of the time that thought would hurt, like one more bruise to a soul already aching with the abuse of years. But now Pam felt it only distantly, the way she felt the first droplets of rain; as a purely external thing. Because, as the uncertain sky solidified and unleashed its fury all around her, she realized that there was a part of her that the wind and the rain and Roy’s indifference couldn’t touch; a calm eye amidst the stormy indecision of her thoughts, a core of certainty.
In the wordless clarity of inspiration, Pam realized that it didn’t matter if Roy noticed anything or not, because she was noticed by someone else; and that Roy didn’t know anything about her, but that was okay, because there was someone else who did, and that knowledge protected her from the loneliness and the fear of being ignored which had kept her awake for half of her life.
The storm was in full swing now, and the charcoal was beginning to smear and smush and melt away between Pam’s fingers. The first dozen pages of the sketchbook were soaked and unworkable, and she picked holes in them with her fingernails.
She knew suddenly that she couldn’t stay with Roy anymore.
It was a close, dark, sudden thought, like a clap of thunder, and it couldn’t have come on a sunny day. But at the same time Pam knew it had been lurking in her subconscious for months, possibly for years, building in size and menace like a thundercloud spreading out to fill the whole horizon. And now that it was here…
Pam was completely soaked at this point, her curls lank and dripping, her sober skirt probably damaged past all hope of salvage, but somehow that didn’t bother her like she’d thought it would. She became aware of the pounding rain for the first time, and shivered, and wondered if she stayed out here all night, if Roy would ever come looking for her, and what he would say if he did.
She waited for a little bit, slowly returning to sanity – the rain seemed to give her strength, just like tears sometimes could. Then, armed with only a sopping sketchbook and newfound determination, she walked inside and steeled herself to take back control of her life.
“Hey, babe,” Roy greeted her, without getting up from the couch or looking up from the TV. “We’re going to that stupid Casino Night thing tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah,” Pam answered, ranting in her head about how it was over, they couldn’t do this anymore, she couldn’t keep living this life she hadn’t wanted, at least not without some major changes – the words were lining up in her head, falling neatly into place like the files she spent all day mindlessly arranging, but somehow none of her thoughts made it as far as her lips. “Yeah, we’re going,” she repeated, listlessly. “Why?”
“Dammit, that means I’ll have to cancel with Kenny,” Roy groaned, and reached sideways across the couch to grab the phone off the coffee table. “Fuck Michael Scott. Pammy, why are you making me go to this thing?”
Pam’s mouth opened and closed a few times, silently, as the sliding glass door glided shut and her courage was muted along with the roar of the storm. “You don’t have to go,” she heard herself saying, as though from a very long way away. “I’ll just go by myself. It’s no big deal.” The moody, wordless murmurings of the TV suddenly grated on her nerves, but she pushed the anger down, past the point where it wouldn’t show. “I can just hang out with Jim.”
“Whatever. Fuck,” Roy growled, tossing the phone aside. “I’ll go. But I’m leaving at ten, okay babe?” He didn’t wait for an answer, because it hadn’t really been a question, so Pam didn’t say anything. Instead she wandered into the kitchen, and when she looked down at her hands she was shocked to see them clenched into fists, white-knuckled, so suddenly that her fingers had ripped half the sketchbook to shreds.
The sight of that poor book, limp and white like a broken-winged bird, shocked her the way nothing else could anymore. She thought fleetingly of Jim, of the time he’d taken in picking it out, of the way his big hands must have cradled it on the way out of the store, of the way he’d smiled when he’d handed it to her, all sparkling eyes and nervous energy like a little kid on Christmas morning…
But she couldn’t be thinking about that, not now, so she cracked the little kitchen window open and let the storm come blowing in, full of bluster and rain and the sweet low scent of grass. Pam breathed it in, promising herself that she would deal with life tomorrow – tomorrow she would think about Jim, tomorrow she would replace the sketchbook and have a serious conversation with Roy, tomorrow she would fix everything that seemed on the edge of going wrong in her life. She didn’t need to deal with it now. There was still tomorrow – there would always be tomorrow.
(And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…)
Roy was calling.
Pam reached to shut the window – then suddenly pulled her hand back, as a flash of anger like lightning tore through her, accompanied by a roar of thunder from outside. She snatched up the sketchbook from Jim and placed it on the windowsill, making sure to open it to a fresh new page so that it would be completely soaked through by morning – and good riddance, she tried to tell herself, and she almost succeeded.
On the other side of the glass, the thunderclouds thrashing across the sky caught her attention, but she quickly shook it off – the storm, like her other silly and impractical fantasies, would be gone by morning. Then she sighed, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and went in to bring it to the man she really (maybe, probably) loved.
Story Notes:
This is just a pre-Casino Night thing I wrote a while ago, which I sort of liked but was too afraid to post. I've updated it a bit now. This is also where I got my nom de plume. Standard disclaimers apply.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Disclaimer: I don't own The Office, or any characters, settings, elements, or anything else thereof. Everything is the property of its creator. Please don't sue.
Chapter End Notes:
The End. Please review, and be kind... I might add a happy ending, if there is popular demand for it.
