Red Lightning

by Laura Pritchett

  RED LIGHTNING

  Copyright © 2015 Laura Prichett

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pritchett, Laura, 1971-

  Red lightning: a novel / Laura Pritchett.

  pages; cm

  1. Single mothers—Fiction. 2. Families—Colorado—Fiction. 3. Drug traffic—Colorado—Fiction. 4. Colorado--Emigration and immigration—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3616.R58R43 2015

  813’.6—dc23

  2014048924

  Cover design by Debbie Berne

  Interior design by Domini Dragoone

  Counterpoint Press

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-641-4

  DEDICATED TO

  Jake and Eliana

  “I felt the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains . . . the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”

  – Willa Cather, My Ántonia

  “This end won’t summarize our forever. Some things can be fixed by fire, some not. Dearheart, already we’re air.”

  — Dean Young, “Elemental”

  Contents

  Part I: Wind

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part II: Water

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part III: Fire

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part IV: Air

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Part V: Earth

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  PART I

  * * *

  Wind

  Chapter One

  What would be the point in confessing a sin for which you had guilt but no real remorse? Bless me, universe, for I have sinned (but I’d do it again in a heartbeat).

  *

  With Libby I stand a miniscule chance of forgiveness. She looks exactly like I thought she would, too, standing in front of the school with yellow cottonwood leaves dripping down from their treebranch faucets. Exactly ten years older since I saw her last, exactly like a thirty-year-old small-town woman should look, coarse brown hair pulled back in a raggedy ponytail, an oversized white T-shirt and cheapbrand jeans and cheaperbrand white tennis shoes. I watch her from across the parking lot as she chats with a kid who must be my daughter outside the same redbrick squarebox podunk crappy school we went to. A crow squawks, and the blue sky squawks in return. HOME OF THE PIRATES flags flap, and oh, Libby, my sweet sister, you’ve never seen the ocean, you’ve never taken something that was unrightfully yours, you’ve never had to go running across countries. You’ve put on blinders so as to sweetly sail through the suffering this world offers.

  Libby turns in my direction, thinking that, from the corner of her eye, down the street from the school, holykamoly, there’s someone who resembles Tess, her good-looking-snarky-trouble-making sister, the sister she hasn’t seen for ten years! but no, impossible, this person is too horrible to be her sister, and yet, and yet . . . could it be? Is it a look-alike? Her imagination?

  I look past Libby at the kid. Amber. Broad brushstrokes from here. Barrette pulling back a twist of brown hair. Turquoise sweatshirt, red backpack. Senses, perhaps, her mother’s intake of breath, turns to stare at me too. In this instant, Libby knows that she could say, “Why, look! See over there? That’s your mother, or at least the woman who gave birth to you, whom we haven’t seen since, but she’s not looking like we’d expect, now is she?” But instead she says something along the lines of “Have a good day, dearheart,” and gives the kid a nudge, and Amber takes off skipping directly up to a group of ponytailed-backpack-wearing-girls, her twist of hair already breaking loose. Libby turns and stands looking at me across the cracked parking lot and across the cracked years, even after the bell rings and the children’s squeals and laughter retreat inside the building and the three yellow swings are left swinging, empty of their energy.

  I offer a small wave of the hand. Such a small movement with such potential, and now each of us standing in the new silence, staring at and considering the considerable space that separates us, including a hundred feet and ten years and a thousand different emotions.

  Who will take the first step forward?

  A gust pelts roadway dirt into my face, but I don’t duck and I don’t blink. I shift my weight from one foot to the other, push my thumbs into my stomach to stop the ache, hear myself moan a soft surprised sorrow. Still, she doesn’t move.

  So I do. I take the first step toward her with a Please don’t turn and go being whispered by every cell of my aching-storming body.

  Chapter Two

  Bravery is another name for stupidity. If someone knew how difficult something was going to be at the onset, chances are she’d never do it. Brave people are stupid people, and somewhere deep inside, they know and embrace this fact.

  Pirates: fighting on a liquid substance that can kill you. Stupid or brave?

  Pollos: deciding to cross a dry landscape that can kill you. Stupid or brave?

  Love: putting your dusty heart in the care of another. That, too, can kill you.

  Motherhood: Libby never would have offered to keep my infant ten years ago had she known the truth back then, which is that the world only pays lip service to the task of parenting. Even kidless me can see that no one has any idea what she is really in for, how she will be broken and smashed.

  I walk up to her. My arms reach out on their own; my forehead ducks; I want to plow into her arms, push my head into her chest, a lastditch effort for a redemptive humanhold, but I draw myself up at the last second. Get my spine straight. Her forgiveness is not an assumption I should make. So instead I say, “I didn’t stick around because I didn’t want to see the results of your stupidity-slash-bravery,” and when I see how the sight of me is registering wild on her face, I add, “I’ve learned one thing in my time, Libby. Well, a few things. But one thing I’ve learned for sure. I was working this theory out on the bus.” I pull a crumpled napkin out of my pocket. The ink has bled into the fibers, and it takes me a moment to make out the words. I have to squint and look off into the sky and cottonwoods and the parking lot before I can return to the napkin. “People protect themselves by withholding their love.” I stop here and look at my sister’s deepdark shiny doebrown eyes and hold them for a heartbeat. She is still taking me in, gutpunched, and I look back down at my napkin so that the moment can pass unnoticed. “So the thing is, these people think they’re being brave and stoic. But of course, they’re just cowards. And then what happens is that their love is no longer sought.
Everyone forgets they’re alive. There’s no advantage in rationing it, you see. Rationing emotions and staying quiet kills you. You think you’re being brave, but really you’re just being stupid.” I cram the napkin back in my pocket. “I could die right now, and no one would notice.” I stretch my neck one way, then the other, and again, until I hear bones pop. The chain clinks against the flagpole, the pirate flag snaps.

  Libby bites a dry fleck of skin from her lip. Now that she’s close up, I can see the details. She is still average in her averageness. Height, weight, Kmart-clothes mediocrity. Hair she doesn’t dye, strands of white peppered at the very top. Her eyes with no makeup, richbrown as mine and not as striking, but temporarily memorable in the way they look stunned.

  “Oh, Tess.” She backs up, her eyes watering. “What happened to you? Do you need a doctor? Your cheek.” She puts out her hand, nearly touches my grated face, puts her hand back down. “Oh, Tess.”

  I clear my throat, look off to the sky behind her. “I guess I finally got worn out.” My eyes follow a single yellow leaf dance down to the earth. “Like that pirate flag up there, which is pretty tattered. It needs replacing. Why would someone pick pirates to be the mascot of a school in the middle of eastern Colorado?”

  “Oh, Tess. Really? It’s you? Oh, it is you. Let me take you to the clinic—”

  And here Tess hugs herself tighttight.

  Tess knows she smells badbad. Blood and vomit and beer

  and animal body.

  Tess wants to howl in a wild voice.

  Howl, Tess, howl! Tess should tell her sister that she’s

  gone feralwild.

  Is suffocating in her ribcage and in her heartbone.

  Tess needs a compass.

  North, south, east, west,

  AND a moral compass, please.

  I crack my neck again. Look at the trees dripping their leaves. Notice the particular hues of yellow, the movement of each individual leaf in the mass of the tree. “I guess I rationed my love. I thought maybe I could give the other path a try. I’m so sorry. I can’t stand up anymore.” I hear my voice say it, feel my knees buckle, and then I am sitting on the cement sidewalk, fingering the cracks, fiddling with the crumbles. The cool has left the earth all in one moment, and I look around at this new day, now hotter and harder.

  She’s digging for a cell phone, so I say, “No, no doctor. Please. That’s not what I need.”

  Libby considers this. Considers the money, the fact I might bolt, that I will have no papers, that a doctor and forms will send me into a world I cannot visit. She puts her phone away. “You could just come to work with me. I’m a nurse.”

  “No. I mean it. That’s not what I need.”

  She takes a deeplong breath in and lets it out in a long quiet sigh. Then she leans over and presses the back of her hand to my forehead, pinches the skin on the back of my hand, feels out my lymph nodes, squats down to peer into my eyes. “You came back to make sure someone would notice your presence on earth? I guess I wish you had another reason. One having a little less to do with you.” But she is tilting my head gently one way, then the other. Her eyes run over my body, her finger running across my face. She puts up a finger to see if my eyes track. “You’re dehydrated. Your cheek looks like Amber’s knees, scraped up like that. It will heal better with ointment to keep it from drying out—”

  “—I wish I were that kind of person, Libby. To come back home out of love. But no. I was born without the warm emotions.”

  She tilts her head sideways at me. “Oh, Tess.” Then, “I’m not going to sit down on the sidewalk with you.” But she lowers herself next to me on the curb anyway: her jeans and my sweatpants, the bend of knees, and hearts that are bending, too, because here we sat, together, as children, waiting for Kay, here to this very spot we would come, having walked a bit from the school so that we’d be less visible, so that Kay’s voice or muffler would not be so loud. Here we would sit, waiting, looking at the school, the weed-filled drygrass park next to it, the post office, the empty lot with cracked asphalt and weeds. Here we are again.

  I double over and stare at my crotch and look inside my brain for the spaces and peace that the pot might still be offering. Sitting like this, crisscross-applesauce, even I am sick with the smell of monthly blood and sex in the bathroom of a Greyhound, the smell of beer on the Colorado State hoodie from the dumpster.

  I dig my fingernails into my wrist, and Libby leans forward and hugs her knees. She puts her palm over her nose, and into her hand she breathes one of those sighs in which you are collecting yourself, and then, hand still over nose, she looks up to the clearblue sky as if she is searching for patience or compassion there. Her eyes move to one side of the street and then the other, perhaps seeing if there’s someone hanging around the shadows, if there is someone watching her sister sit in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “I’m alone,” I say. “I came alone.”

  She nods, taking this in. “Well, I didn’t expect this. To see you.”

  “—I know.”

  “When you left—”

  “—I know. It was over, between us.”

  “No. What I was going to say was, you were so beautiful.” She takes her hand from her face and gently touches my face. “It’s swollen, too.”

  Someone revs his truck a few blocks over, there’s the distant sound of semi-trucks on the highway, the barking of a single dog, and not a single sound for the blur of tears that rise up in my eyes. We are alone, her eyes and mine. No one is out, the stores haven’t opened yet, the kids have been dropped off, and everyone has retreated to allow us this brief flash of time together. My eyes break from hers and focus on one lone figure in the far distance, outside of town, walking a dog and kicking at leaves.

  “It’s just a missing tooth. I had one pulled the other day.” Then, because speaking-attempt is why I am here, I try to continue, although the words bunch up in my throat for a while and my mouth moves in silence, like a newly caught fish gasping for air. Finally, I add, “It hurt so much, and I was so mad at it for hurting, and I didn’t have the money for the pain pills, so I got drunk and went up to a stucco wall and scraped my face against it. Just to show it, I guess, that it could hurt worse. Just to show it who was boss. Crazy, right?”

  It occurs to me that my sin is that I’ve never been sorry for being like this. Making a situation worse. Getting pregnant and then leaving the baby for her to care for and then belittling her for doing just that. Getting a tooth pulled and then scraping up my cheek because it was hurting and then hating myself for looking so bad. Lose-lose situation for her, for my face, for everything I have made worse because it hurt.

  I look over at Libby in time to see her blink, blink, blink, tears are coming, and she’s blinking at the brightblue sky, asking the sky to reverse-rain them away. “I don’t know what to do with you. I can see you’re still . . . Well, listen. I need to get to work. And by the way, Kay is sick. Very sick.”

  Kay. White-haired-ponytailed-lousy-mother-Kay. With the green flashing eyes of anger. With the narcissism of a thousand misguided gods. “How sick? Sick enough to die? I bet that is not sitting well with her.”

  “You should see her. Before.” She bites another flake of skin on her lip. “So that’s not why you came back? To see Mom? Why did you come back, Tess?”

  I look at her left hand, which is, somehow, miraculously resting on my knee, and which has a simple silver wedding band that is catching the light. “You ever think that maybe someone just needs to see home before she can leave again? To clarify the direction she’ll take? Well. The only thing I know for sure is that I am tired of sleeping in my car and eating out of dumpsters. I’ve been camping for a long time, but winter is coming. And I wanted to see my sister. And her baby. Who is not a baby anymore, I can see. My compass just brought me here, Libby. It just directed me here. Homing pigeon. Homing magnet. For just a bit. Don’t worry, I won’t stay long. At one point, I made a list.” Here, I lean to the left so I can
dig around in the deep pocket of my sweatpants again, and I pull out a bunch of papers with shit written on them, but I can’t find it, so I cram the whole wad of papers back in. “I like lists. They help me think. I learned that from you. I wanted to see Amber. I wanted to see you. I wanted to be honest. I wanted to come here and be as honest as I could and see what happened to you all. So at least I’d know.”

  A pickup truck pulls up to the curb, and a little kid jumps out. The dad yells, Ride the bus home, dude, the kid waves a hand backward at his father, brushing the comment away, and then the father looks at us, pauses, looks again, lifts his hand off the steering wheel in that smalltown wave and drives off.

  My hands don’t know what to do. I start picking at a cuticle and then scratching my wrist, and then I sit on my hands, trying to cage the birds that they are. “So, sorry. I’m nervous. I saw Amber. What grade’s she in?”

  “Fifth. You smell . . . Tess, you smell . . . like you’re rotting. I’m sorry. But it’s true. Let’s get you somewhere . . .”

  “Ms. Skeek still teaching?”

  “Nope.”

  “Amber a smart kid? Healthy?”

  “Yep.”

  “Like you.”

  “Smarter and healthier than either of us ever were. That’s the truth.” She regards her hands, now both in her lap, fingers laced. While she’s looking down, I look at her sideways to see a crooked wet stream across her face. The water zigzags down, just like the cottonwood leaves zigzag down through sky above her. She doesn’t try to stop, and she doesn’t apologize. Instead, she waits, and I wait, and the tree waits, and we all wait under the pulsing blue sky.

  She breathes in very slowly, finally recalibrating. “Amber knows about you. That you gave birth at the hospital and took off the next day.”

  “Good.” I don’t argue the point. I did come back once, to sign the papers and make it all official. I did hold that infant kid then.

  “That you haven’t stayed in touch. Not even a birthday card.” She glances at the school, back at me. “I’ve always just been clear with her. No use in lying. Wouldn’t know what to say anyway. This is her first week. School just started. She’s got enough to worry about already.” She wipes her face with her forearm. “You homeless? Where are you staying?”