The Truth About Love and Lightning

by Susan McBride

  Who was Abby’s father?

  That was the all-important question in those days. Forty years ago, unmarried girls who got pregnant were little more than tainted goods. It didn’t seem to matter that someone of the opposite sex was equally at fault. Regardless of how it had happened, once the word got out, you were never looked upon the same again. If Gretchen had told the truth, it would have been far worse. So it had seemed better—safer—to answer as she had. She told her mother exactly what she’d told Cooper and Lily Winston.

  “It’s Sam’s,” she’d lied, sure it was the right thing to do. His was the only name that came to mind, and hadn’t he very clearly told her he’d do anything for her? But now she wondered if lying about something so big, even with the best of intentions, had finally come back to haunt her.

  And it could very well have, if the man in the parlor was who she thought he might be. If he was really and truly Sam Winston.

  “Mom?” Abby drew away from her embrace, sniffling as she brushed tears from her cheeks. “Is everything all right with you?”

  Despite the fact that a man with Sam’s eyes was passed out on the parlor sofa, the phone was dead, the front drive was blocked, and the power was on despite the snapped lines, Gretchen gave her daughter a smile meant to reassure. “We survived a twister pretty much unscathed, and you’re back home with us, Abs. I’d say we’re doing great.”

  “That depends on how you define great,” Bennie harrumphed. “Tell your daughter what the cat dragged in. She’s going to find out soon enough.”

  “What the cat dragged in?” Abby echoed, and her brow furrowed as she looked at her mother. “You mean Matilda brought something inside? Like a mouse or a rabbit?”

  “Oh, far bigger than a rabbit,” Bennie remarked in her know-it-all way, and Gretchen wished she had a dish towel in hand to swat her.

  “Please, let’s not go there,” she muttered, keeping an arm firmly around Abby’s waist.

  “Why not tell her?” Trudy urged, shoving thin hands into her smock pockets and rocking back on her heels. “Tell her what the tornado dropped into the grove along with all the walnuts. It’ll take her mind off things.”

  “Walnuts in the grove? But that’s impossible, isn’t it?” Abby’s tired eyes squinted. “What’s going on?”

  “Later,” Gretchen insisted, ignoring the determined set of her sisters’ faces and focusing solely on Abby. “Let’s get you and your suitcase up to your old room before we do anything else.” With that, she steered her daughter through the dining room, toward the stairs, impatient to get her settled. Abby clearly looked exhausted. “I can fill you in after you’ve gotten some rest.”

  “Why not now?” Abby dug in her heels at the base of the steps. “What are you hiding? Is someone else here?”

  “Mmmm.” As if on cue, a low moan crept through the stillness, and Abby’s focus shifted toward the parlor.

  “Someone else is in the house,” she said and wrested her arm from Gretchen’s grasp.

  “Abs!”

  When Gretchen caught up with her, Abby stood on the threadbare rug in the center of the parlor, directly in front of the claw-foot sofa, her arms stiffly at her sides.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Who is this? What happened to him?”

  A solitary lamp burned, casting Abby’s profile in shadow as she watched the man who lay so still, his eyes closed, limbs twitching, an occasional groan escaping chapped lips. Though a quilt covered his body, his face was fully visible above it. Gretchen had wiped the worst of the dirt from his skin and hair, then had taken careful scissors to his overgrown beard, trimming it to his jawline. He looked more human now, less gray than pink. The knot on his brow had already calmed from an angry purple to a rather dull red.

  “Is he okay?” Abby whispered. “Was he hit by the oak when it fell?”

  “He was hit by something,” Gretchen said, leaning close to her daughter. “He spoke a little when I brought him in but not enough to tell me anything.”

  And he hadn’t opened his eyes since he’d collapsed. He felt warm to the touch but not feverish. Gretchen didn’t think he was truly delirious, merely in a deep sleep, thanks to the trauma his body had suffered.

  “He seems familiar somehow.” Abby cocked her head, looking at him. “Is he from around here?”

  Gretchen hesitated before answering as carefully as possible. “When I asked, he couldn’t remember his name. He needs to sleep and heal.”

  “So the tornado picked him up and dropped him onto the farm, is that it?” Abby tugged on the fringed hem of her sweater. “And it touched nothing else? Not the house or the barn?”

  “That’s pretty much it,” Gretchen replied, though Abby hardly looked satisfied by her answer. “Okay, here’s what I know,” she began, before falling into storytelling mode as she’d done so many times when Abby was a child. She described the ferocious storm that had come out of nowhere, the winds that had battered the house, banging shutters against clapboard and sending the women to the cellar, and finally the twister that had felled the mighty oak and showered the farm with debris.

  As she spoke, Abby bent nearer and nearer the fellow, examining him far too closely for Gretchen’s comfort.

  “C’mon, Abs.” She touched her daughter’s arm, willing her to move away. “He needs to rest. There’s nothing we can do for him at the moment.”

  But Abby wasn’t listening.

  “Doesn’t this recent storm remind you of another storm you told me about a dozen times before? Of rain and wind and lightning, and walnuts dropping from the clouds in scores?” her daughter said, straightening up and tucking dark hair behind her ears.

  “It certainly does,” Bennie muttered and began feeling her way to the foot of the couch. Her chin tipped toward Abby, though her gaze drifted up toward the ceiling. “As I see it, there’s a simple connection, one soul who could stir things up like that.”

  “Yes, yes, and who could cause the scent of lemongrass to carry on the wind,” Trudy chimed in.

  “For Pete’s sake,” Gretchen said, hating that her sisters were feeding Abby’s fertile imagination. “Please, don’t do this.” She knew how much Abby had always yearned to have her father back, but she didn’t want her child to believe what wasn’t real; no matter that Gretchen had been wondering the same thing herself. “We know nothing about this man, not who he is or where he came from.”

  “But do you think it could be him?” Abby crouched beside the divan much as Gretchen had earlier. She couldn’t seem to take her eyes off the injured man. “Does any part of you believe that he’s come back?”

  Gretchen squirmed, wiping damp palms on the thighs of her jeans, relieved when neither Bennie nor Trudy responded. Surely neither wanted to encourage Abby any more than they already had.

  “You’re tired, Abs,” Gretchen said and took her daughter’s hand, rubbing gently. “You’re upset about Nate and the baby. You’re seeing what you want to see. That’s perfectly natural.”

  “You can’t tell me you’re not curious.” Abby stared at her mother, her brow furrowed. “It’s his long face and the bump on the bridge of his nose. Those high cheekbones, too. And what about his mouth? That same thin line from the photograph,” Abby went on, her eyes too bright, her cheeks too pink. “Lots of things can change, but bone structure doesn’t lie.”

  She sounded like Annika, seeking the truth in cheekbones. Gretchen glanced at her sisters for help, knowing they could sense her need even if they couldn’t see it. But neither uttered a word.

  He’s not your father, she wanted to say to her child, but couldn’t bring herself to do it for so many reasons.

  “You used to tell me he’d come home someday,” Abby went on, eyes filling with tears. “So why can’t this be real? Maybe he was on his way when the storm hit and got caught up in it. Or what if he made the rain? What if the twister was his way back? You used to say that was his gift. So what if that gift brought him home?” Her slender hand reached for Gretch
en, grabbing hold of her sleeve. “You’re the one who made me believe all those things in the first place. Were they all lies or was any of it true?”

  Any words caught fast in Gretchen’s throat. How exactly was she supposed to respond to that? Tell her vulnerable child that those stories were gross exaggerations?

  “My sweet Abigail,” she said, deciding to take the path of reason. She grasped Abby’s arms, holding on tightly. “If this man is Sam, why didn’t he contact us sooner? Why would he wait until now when he’s had forty years to do it?”

  “I don’t know.” The girl sighed, drawing away and shaking her head. “Whatever kept him away must’ve been something powerful, something beyond his control. Still, he must have heard me every time I wished for this. All those candles on every birthday cake.”

  Wishes aren’t magic, Gretchen wanted to remind her, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Because she had shared with Abby what Lily Winston had shared with her: larger-than-life tales of Sam’s lineage, of the men who’d come before him and the mysticism surrounding them. But if that magic were real—if it were true—was it strong enough to bring someone back from the dead, or wherever it was Sam had gone?

  “We know nothing about this man, only that he needs our help,” she insisted, trying to calm Abby down, finding herself the voice of reason simply by default. “Sometimes even strangers can look like those we love and miss.”

  “He must have an ID, a driver’s license, something,” Abby said and looked ready to pick the man’s pockets.

  But Gretchen caught her arm. “Baby, there’s nothing there,” she told her. “We already checked.”

  Abby backed off, heading over to a nearby wing chair. With a heavy sigh, she slumped into its arms, tilting her head against its high back. “Please don’t look at me like I’ve lost my mind,” she said, gazing up at her mother. “Because I haven’t, I promise.”

  “I don’t think that at all,” Gretchen said.

  “Goodness knows, you’re no crazier than the rest of us,” Trudy remarked and wandered over to the chair, standing beside it, showing her support for Abby.

  “Maybe we’re due for a miracle,” Bennie added, not about to be left out of things.

  Oh, boy.

  Gretchen crossed her arms tightly, cursing the timing that had brought the injured man to the farm and Abby home on the same day. She was afraid of what such a deep-seated longing could do to Abby when she was already in such a churned-up state. The girl was fearful that she’d lost Nate, frightened about having a baby, and now she’d begun to convince herself that her long-lost daddy had come home to take his rightful place—a place that had been kept wide open and waiting for forty years.

  “As lovely as miracles sound, we can’t jump to conclusions,” Gretchen said, picking her words carefully. “What if he awakens clearheaded and tells us he was merely passing through, that he’s someone with a family who’s missing him?”

  “If he does, then I’ll stop wishing for things I can’t have,” Abby replied, the strain in her voice all too apparent. “But until then, there’s nothing wrong with hoping, is there?”

  “No,” Gretchen said, her heart nearly breaking. “I guess there’s not.”

  Abby sighed and patted the arms of the chair before pulling herself upright. “You’re right. I’m really tired. I think I’ll hit the sack.” She kissed her aunts on their cheeks before she gave Gretchen a hug. “How about I see you all in the morning?”

  “Goodnight, lamb,” Trudy said, and Bennie added, “Sleep tight.”

  Abby gave the unconscious man one final look before she left the room. A few seconds after, Gretchen heard the thump-thump of the suitcase as Abby pulled it slowly up the stairs.

  “Good grief, aren’t you going to help the poor girl with that? We’ll stay with your patient,” Bennie chastised her, and Gretchen scurried out of the parlor, pausing at the base of the steps.

  “Abs,” she called up, “you should let me do that!”

  But her daughter had already ascended to the second-floor landing. “Can you get my bag?” she asked, peering down around the whitewashed balustrade. “I left it in the kitchen.”

  “Of course,” Gretchen said as Abby disappeared around the upstairs railing, suitcase wheels clacking as she rolled it toward her old room.

  Abby’s heavy-looking satchel lay on the breakfast table, tipped on its side, spilling some of its contents. Gretchen righted it and began to stuff the loose objects back in: a black marker, several quarters, a tube of pale pink lipstick, and a paperback-size drawing tablet from which a photograph protruded.

  Gretchen couldn’t help herself. She slid the photo from the pages, and her heart leaped into her throat when she realized its subject.

  “Sam,” she breathed his name, seeing a sixteen-year-old version of the man who would eventually leave Walnut Ridge with his heart broken. It was a long time since Gretchen had glimpsed this image. She’d given the photo to Abby when the girl was in nursery school. Her daughter had constantly peppered her with questions about why all her classmates had a mommy and a daddy while she had a mommy and two aunts. “You do have a father, Abs, and this is him,” Gretchen had fibbed.

  She ran a finger over the slender face, his features frozen in time. Sam sat on the porch steps in his overalls, his long legs extended, an unruly black cowlick curled upon his brow. His silver eyes were bright though the curve of his mouth was barely detectible. The photo was limp from handling, faded in spots around the edges.

  “Oh, Abs,” Gretchen said and sighed gently. No wonder the girl was so taken with the thought of her father returning; she had never let the idea of him go.

  Who was my daddy? Abby had asked so many times. What was he like? Why did he leave? How did he die?

  “Sam was a lot like my own father, Hank,” she recalled Lily Winston saying not long before she’d passed away. “He needed to make his own destiny, even if that destiny was ill-fated.”

  Lily was the one who’d first told her that Hank Littlefoot had been marked as a shaman, his own grandpa having been a tribal shaman before him. “He could have stayed and used his gift for the good of his people, but he didn’t want to remain on the rez. He felt no real connection to the government land or even his people.” Lily had then smiled one of her rare smiles. “Only when he settled here on the farm did he understand what having a home truly meant.”

  From that point forth, Gretchen had imagined Hank Littlefoot as a medicine man, healing the sick, and she’d often wondered if he wasn’t the reason why Sam had wanted to go to Africa to help those less fortunate. Sam liked looking out for the underdog, maybe because he’d always felt like an underdog himself.

  “Gretch? Are you still in here?” Bennie’s voice cracked her reverie, and Gretchen let the photograph slip from her hands.

  “Just getting Abby’s bag,” she said, scrambling to pick up the picture from the floor near her feet. “A few things had fallen out.”

  “Well, Abby hollered down and asked for a glass of warm milk.” Her sister began banging around, opening cabinets. “If you wait another few minutes, I’ll send it up with you.”

  “Great,” Gretchen said, her heart thudding. As quietly as she could, she flipped open the sketchbook, prepared to quickly tuck the photograph inside and be done with it. Only something else caught her eye, the pencil drawings themselves. She looked at one and then another, turning pages to peruse even more after that.

  Oh dear, she thought.

  Every rendering was some version of Sam Winston. Not just the gangly boy in the photograph, but clearly Abby’s own ideas of what he could have looked like as he aged. There was Sam with short hair, long hair, in a baseball cap, and balding; his face both unlined and with sharp creases at the mouth and nose; bespectacled and bearded.

  Indeed, it was the bearded drawing that made Gretchen’s breath catch. The sketch of an older Sam with gaunt cheeks and facial hair looked very much like the man lying on the parlor sofa. No wonder Abby had
gotten as carried away as she had. She doubtless felt like she’d seen a dream come to life.

  Or a ghost turned to flesh.

  Gretchen pressed the sketchbook to her chest and sighed deeply. She felt completely responsible for fostering Abby’s obsession, for causing her daughter to wish for something that she’d never really had to begin with.

  Because what Abby didn’t know was that the lanky teen sitting on the steps in her treasured photograph—and the subject of all her fanciful drawings—was not the man who’d fathered her that summer night so long ago. That story was one Gretchen had never told to Annika or Sam’s folks, not even her sisters. At the time, it had seemed far, far easier to lie about what had happened than to confess what a fool she’d been. Only suddenly it was beginning to feel an awful lot like that lie was coming back to bite her squarely in the ass.

  The Gift

  We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.

  —MARIE CURIE

  Six

  1930s

  Henry “Hank” Littlefoot was a bona fide descendant of the Otoe-Missouria tribes—a full-blooded Native American and the grandson of a shaman. He was also Sam Winston’s maternal grandfather. Born in 1915, Hank was one of a few hundred Otoe-Missourias still in existence; the tribes had been pushed out of land they’d once called home, resettled into the Oklahoma Territory.

  A handsome boy who learned to read by age four, Hank began making up tales of his own once he’d read his way through the meager stack of books on the shelves of the reservation’s one-room schoolhouse. By the time he had turned twelve, he’d become enraptured by the art of storytelling and regularly entertained the younger children, mixing ancestral folklore and yarns spun from his own imagination.

  By his teens, he knew that he wanted to be on the stage, not exactly an aspiration that either of his parents seemed to understand. “You belong here. This is your world,” his father had told him and looked him sternly in the face. “On the day you were born, the sky filled with lightning. A bolt struck the roof and nearly set the house on fire. It’s the sign of a shaman,” he’d insisted. “You have the gift, my son.” With that, he’d gripped his son’s shoulder, where Hank’s skin bore a birthmark the shape of a teardrop. “My father had the mark as well. You’re meant to heal, not to play roles on a stage.” His pa had grunted unhappily, shaking his head. He was a mechanic on the reservation, which involved a different type of healing entirely. “You will be a voice to the spirits someday, whether you like it or not.”