Soulstruck

by Natasha Sinel

  He looks at me and I hold eye contact with him for as long as he’ll let me, his pupils getting bigger and then smaller again like they’re breathing. Then he flicks his gaze to my ear where he’s more comfortable.

  “How are your legs?” he asks.

  “Good.”

  “That’s good,” he says. “They healed well.”

  And they did. When I looked at them this morning, twisting my head as far as I could to get a look in the mirror, I could see that they weren’t puffy anymore, the marks where the stitches had been were light pink instead of red. Mom says the scars on my legs will fade to nothing eventually. And the scar on my heart will fade even sooner. I’m not sure I believe her. I’m not sure whether to believe anything she says anymore.

  THREE

  The lofty pine is oftenest shaken by the winds; High towers fall with a heavier crash; And the lightning strikes the highest mountain.

  —Horace (poet)

  Reed showed up at our door four months ago, at the beginning of December. The quarterly meeting had already started. I was in my room doing homework, trying to drown out the talking with music, but it was impossible. My room shared a wall with the back room, which was where all the meetings were. I heard Angela’s voice, listing off her latest ailments, always blaming the lightning. The lightning. The lightning. Sometimes they didn’t even use the word, they’d just say “since it hit me, I have no peripheral vision” or “since the strike, my husband says I scream in my sleep.” And always the sound of ice cubes clinking in cheap glasses filled with gin and maybe a little tonic.

  There was a knock at the front door. I knew that everyone who was coming to the meeting was already here, so I thought it was Serena. She was picking me up to go out for a coffee study break. I ran to the front slider, still holding my pencil. I slid open the door, but it wasn’t Serena. It was this guy who looked homeless and much older than he probably was.

  “Hi,” he said quietly. “Is this where the support group meets?”

  I must not have answered him because he continued. “The lightning-strike survivors group?”

  I nodded. I’d seen tons of them before. The newbies. The ones who’d never met anyone like them before. Whose family and friends didn’t understand why a lightning strike that may have left no visible physical damage could turn them into someone else and could change them forever. I’d seen them come, and I’d seen them go. I’d never known for sure whether Mom had anything special that made her become all these people’s savior. But at that moment, I hoped she did have something. For this boy. I hoped that he would get better because, underneath the grime and the gloom and the fear, there was something in there. Behind the misery in his eyes—blue like the hottest part of a fire—was a teeny, tiny glimmer of hope.

  I gestured for him to come in and I pointed to the back room. He hesitated.

  “Should I take my shoes off?” he asked. They were expensive sneakers—the kind that a basketball star sponsored—but they were well past the point of being worn out.

  “No, it’s okay,” I said.

  He nodded but still didn’t move.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “About, you know, the lightning. I mean, I assume that’s why you’re here.”

  “Thanks. You too?”

  I shook my head no. “My mom. A long time ago.”

  He stayed put, not in any rush to get to the meeting.

  I’d heard all the group members’ stories—where they were, the storm, the strike, what it felt like, what happened afterward, hazy memories, and then everything after that—the stuff that came so slowly, they almost didn’t notice the relationship to the strike—the physical, emotional, mental changes. They thought it was just a coincidence that they’d forgotten their locker combination at the gym, or that they’d started to lose their hearing, or that one day months later, they’d wake up with a sudden pain in their knee so bad, the only thing that could help was oxycodone. Tons of it. Or the insomnia, or the mood swings that became so erratic, their spouses would leave. Or the ability to quote entire Shakespeare sonnets they hadn’t read in thirty years. Or … like in my mom’s case, the sudden power to see soul mates.

  I’d heard every possible iteration of the story since I was a little girl. I was pretty sure that I never needed to hear another for the rest of my life, unless it was my own. But something in me wanted to hear one more. His. With his old expensive shoes, slightly dulled bright blue eyes, his fit-looking arms and chest under the ratty clothes and all the dirt, it seemed like he hadn’t always been this way. He’d been a rich kid somewhere with a completely different life. And now here he was in my house looking for whatever it was he needed to try to make himself whole.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’ll take you back there.”

  He looked relieved. Grateful, even, that he wouldn’t have to enter alone. I opened the door to the back room, with him close behind me.

  The talking stopped.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Mom said. As a child, I’d been to many of the meetings, despite the fact that they were no place for a little girl, but in the last few years, I’d felt less welcome. I wasn’t one of them.

  “This is—um.” I looked at the guy. I didn’t know his name.

  “Reed,” he said, looking down at the floor.

  “This is Reed,” I said. “He came for the meeting.”

  In an instant, Mom was out of her seat and in front of Reed. She put her hand on his cheek and she stared into his eyes.

  “Reed. Please come in. We’re glad you’re here. You’re always welcome here.”

  Ron got up to let Reed have his seat.

  Reed looked at me as he sat and smiled, like a thank-you.

  “Rachel,” Mom said. “Would you get one of those stools from the kitchen?”

  I nodded, and when I returned a few seconds later with the stool, Ron took it from me.

  “Thanks, doll,” he said. Ron’s second wife had died last year. She’d also been a strike survivor—they’d met through the group—and I’d heard them all talking earlier about what a blessing it was that she wasn’t in pain anymore.

  Mom gave me a quick glance and I knew I was to close the doors behind me. I gave Reed a look that I hoped conveyed “good luck,” and I went back to my room to finish my homework.

  Twenty minutes later, there was a knock on the front door again. This time it was Serena. I grabbed my vest and went with her for coffee. I didn’t tell her about Reed even though I could feel him settling on my skin like a soft, transparent film. If it had been a few months earlier, before she’d joined the cheerleading team, I definitely would have told her about him. Actually, Serena had known me so well, she might have guessed by the look on my face that something had just happened, even before I could tell her. But she didn’t guess and I didn’t tell her. That’s how I knew that things had already started to change between us.

  FOUR

  It really does change you. It’s an invisible burden. People don’t understand—there’s no sympathy for people hurting.

  —Phil Broscovak (lightning-strike survivor)

  Jay and I are silent as he drives the two minutes from Comma Beach to my house. Ron’s yellow Chevy and Sue’s black pick-up are parked side by side in my driveway. I groan. I just want to be able to walk into my house and not have people there.

  “You want to come over?” Jay asks. He isn’t always the best at reading people, but he’s gotten very good with me.

  “It’s okay. I’ve got my American Lit paper,” I say, getting out of the car. Water drips off me; the seat is soaking wet. “Oops, sorry about that.”

  He shrugs.

  “Are we still getting together later?” he asks.

  “I think so,” I say. “I’ll check with Serena, but she said seven-ish.”

  “Okay.”

  “Call you later,” I say, closing the car door.

  I stick my hands in the pockets of my pajama bottoms and run up the front steps. But on the third step, I trip where
a board is loose. Even though I get my hands out in time to brace my fall, a splinter wedges itself into my palm, and my knee lands on a sharp corner. By the time I get up and brush off my hands, Jay has gotten out of the car and is ready to inspect them and my knee. He grimaces and then looks toward the front door, but I shake my head.

  “My first-aid kit’s in the car,” he says.

  Back in the car, he opens the kit on his lap. He works on the splinter with tweezers, and I involuntarily yelp at a sudden pinch. Jay doesn’t say a word. He’s temporarily super-mature EMT-in-training-Jay, and not seventeen-year-old dorky-Jay. And EMT-Jay, though extremely skilled, doesn’t have the warmest bedside manner. I would make a joke about it, but he’s torturing me with the tweezers, so I keep quiet.

  “This is in deep,” he whispers, concentrating, pulling at my skin.

  Just when I’m about to scream for him to stop, he says, “Got it.”

  His eyes are bright when he holds up the long skinny splinter. He opens a packet with a cleansing pad and dabs at my hand, then the scrape through the hole in my pajamas.

  For a moment, I imagine what it would’ve been like if he’d been the one to stitch up the cuts on the backs of my legs that night at the hospital. He’s one of the few who have actually seen my scars.

  One morning a few weeks after my fall, I’d forgotten to set my alarm. So when I wasn’t outside waiting for Jay to pick me up, he came inside to get me.

  I’d slept in boxers and a tank, and I must’ve been hot because I woke up on top of the covers. When I opened my eyes, Jay was sitting on the bed next to me.

  “Wow,” Jay said. He was staring at my scars. The stitches had been removed a few days before. And he was tracing the scars with his fingers, barely touching them. The pink, puffy, jagged lines that covered my thighs and the backs of my knees. The physical reminders of the glass and metal.

  “What are you doing?” I had asked, coming out of sleep slowly. Since my injury, I didn’t wear shorts or short skirts if I could help it. Even on the hottest days in gym class, I wore sweatpants. I didn’t want people looking at the scars that told the story of how naive I’d been, and how hurt.

  “I knocked a few times but you didn’t answer. We’re going to be late,” he said, but he said it slowly and quietly, like he didn’t care.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I wish I could have brought you in that night and watched them take it all out, and close up each wound. Like, this one here,” he said, touching the side of my right knee, which made me shiver. “This one looks different from the rest. The stitches weren’t quite as even as the others. It just makes me wonder. About all of it. Who was it? Did they do the best they could or were they at the end of a long shift when you got there? Was it done by a resident or a physician’s assistant?”

  This was why some people thought he was a freak. But it made me like him even more.

  “You should get up,” he said. “We’re late.”

  “Okay.” I turned over and pulled the sheet up around my waist.

  He didn’t move.

  “Jay,” I said. “Let me get up.”

  “Do they still hurt?” he asked, watching my fingers fiddle with the corner of the sheet.

  “They itch sometimes. And they ache when it rains.”

  He nodded and looked at my chest—I wasn’t wearing a bra under the tank I’d slept in, obviously.

  “Jay,” I said. “Leave my room so I can get dressed.”

  I smile now as I watch him dab at the scrape on my knee. He must mistake my smile for a wince of pain because he says, “Just wash this with soap later. It’s really nothing.”

  I know it’s nothing—a stupid splinter and a scrape—but it feels like it’s something, because I like the way his hand feels holding mine. And that scares me to death because my heart is supposed to be broken and my world is spinning and I don’t know what’s real anymore or whether I can even trust my own feelings.

  “Okay?” Jay asks, wiping down the tweezers with alcohol.

  “Yeah.”

  “I wasn’t really on my way to Comma,” he says as he reorganizes the contents of his kit. “I stopped at your house. When you weren’t home, I figured you’d be at the tree, but I hoped you weren’t.”

  “It wasn’t what you think.” Of course it’s what he thinks.

  “I can’t reconcile all that stuff with my view of how the world works,” he says.

  “I wasn’t, I just—”

  “I didn’t even know you were still doing that.”

  “I’m not,” I say quickly. “I’m not anymore. It was just—it was habit, I guess.”

  He nods toward the house and starts the car.

  “Good luck in there. Tell them I said hi.”

  I walk up the stairs slowly, avoiding the broken step. Jay drives away, and my hand throbs.

  When I open the door, I smell the cigarette smoke before I even hear their voices in the back room. Mom’s deep laugh. Ron’s raspy chuckle. Sue’s high-pitched chirp.

  I’m starving—working in the garage and then running for the lightning sapped every ounce of energy I had. But I don’t want to see them right now, so I pass by the kitchen instead of stopping on the way to my room.

  “Rach?” Mom calls out.

  My wet clomping boots must have given me away.

  “Yeah?”

  I pray she won’t make me go in there. I’m afraid they’ll bring up Reed and I can’t hear his name right now.

  “Where’d you go?”

  I stop where I am, halfway to my room. I hear her footsteps approaching and she appears in the front hall. She notices me now, soaking wet, smudged with dirt, and she lifts her eyebrows.

  “What happened? I was worried,” she says. She notices the hole in my pajama pants and squats down to look.

  “I tried to go for a walk, but I got caught in the rain. Jay drove by and picked me up. And I tripped on the loose step on the way in. We need to fix it. Jay had his first-aid kit in the car. I’m fine.” I’m babbling.

  She stands back up and pushes a strand of damp hair out of my face.

  “Remind me about the steps again tomorrow. Come say hello, okay? They’re dying to see you. You want something to eat?”

  “Sure,” I say. “I’ll change first.”

  In my room, I peel off my wet clothes, put on sweats, towel off my hair, and go to the back room.

  “Look at this beauty!” Sue squeaks. She’s on the couch, and Ron’s next to her.

  “Hi, Sue. Hi, Ron,” I say, trying to smile.

  Ron looks worse than usual. His skin is paper-thin and his shaggy beard is dishwater gray. The scar that runs from his hairline down the side of his face to his chin looks more pronounced now against his pale white skin.

  Sue is crocheting, as always, her fingers working faster than seems humanly possible. She’s wearing a crocheted pink sweater and a green crocheted scarf. It looks like she’s making a purple neck warmer now.

  She places it next to her, then stands in front of me, staring into my eyes.

  “How are you, honey?” She puts her hands on my cheeks. I don’t like it when she does that, but I would never tell her that. “Your mom’s been giving me daily updates but it’s good to see you up and about.”

  “Much better,” I say, giving her a big smile. “Almost like new.”

  “That makes me happy. After what happened, my heart broke into a million pieces for you.”

  “Yeah, I’m doing okay. How are you guys feeling?” I ask, hoping to move the subject away from Reed and what happened. But it’s a stupid question because now I’ll be here forever.

  “Okay, about the same,” Sue says. “Memory’s getting worse, though.”

  Sue is about Mom’s age, but she looks like an old lady. She’d been to so many doctors to find out what’s wrong with her, but once she found Mom and the survivors group, she stopped trying.

  “Oh please,” Ron says. “Mine’s kaput. Last week I just couldn’t take it any
more; I put a gun to my head. But you know what? I forgot to load the goddamn thing!”

  Ron and Sue burst out laughing like this is the funniest joke they’ve ever heard, even though I’ve heard it at least forty-seven times throughout the years. But they probably forgot that he used it on me already, given their crappy memory and all.

  Mom’s memory is just fine. She remembers everything. She just refuses to share her memories with me. Just little things, you know, like any single detail about my father at all. I suddenly remember the box in the garage and my fingers practically tingle at the thought of looking inside. It will have to wait, though. I haven’t told Mom about my plan to fix up the garage yet. I figure she’ll be okay with me moving in there, but if she saw me poking around, she might want to look through things first, and I’d lose my chance to open that box.

  “So, I hope you’re okay with us being around a bit more the next couple of weeks—we’ve got the meeting to plan for,” Sue says, sitting and picking up her crocheting. She must realize that I get uncomfortable when the house is full of people. She and Ron never stay the night, at least. They both live close enough to come and go.

  I must have blocked out the fact that at least twenty people will be here for the lightning-strike survivors big meeting. Would Reed show up for it? If he was planning to come, Mom would have warned me. Right?

  Now moving into the garage feels like an emergency.

  Ron clears his throat, and I picture the nuggets of phlegm and nicotine and whatever other crap is in his body rattling around.

  “So … how many are we expecting?” he asks, his voice raspy.

  “I can’t remember!” Sue shouts and they both laugh their asses off again.

  Mom comes in, smiling. “What’s all this?”

  “Just teasing your gorgeous daughter, who seems to be doing just great,” Sue says. “Every time I see her, she looks different. Or maybe that’s because I don’t remember what she looks like from one time to the next!”

  Mom rolls her eyes, smiles. This smile isn’t for me, though; it’s for them—Ron and Sue, and the other survivors.