Red Lightning

by Laura Pritchett

  “The cake didn’t fluff up.” I poke it with my finger. “It doesn’t have enough air.” I look at her straight on. “Okay, I’m going to try to be honest. Why am I here? Well, thank you for asking, actually. I wanted to see you, Amber. I regret not . . . oh, about a million things. Not sending you birthday cards. I should have. I’m sorry about not living my life better. I want to say all the things you would expect. Clichés are sometimes clichés for a reason, you know? Because they’re true. Anyway. It sounds cliché, but I want to say . . . that I’m very sorry. I hope you know that I didn’t leave because of you personally. That is so true. I left because that was always my plan, always always always, and then I got pregnant. This place has been a bad match for me since I was a kid. I never wanted kids. Believe me, I would have been a shitty mom. Probably the shittiest mom ever to exist on the planet, and I knew it, and so I left. And then I just cut that part of my life off. Which is why I didn’t send cards or anything. It just didn’t exist. I have always joked that I was born without emotions. I’m not sure that’s my fault. Probably it is. But certainly it isn’t your fault. And yet you’ve had to live with the consequences of it. And for that I am sorry.” I take a breath and exhale. That’s more or less how I practiced, and it is exactly the truth.

  She takes a forkful, considers it for long enough that I know she’s trying to calm emotions or form words. “That’s what my mom says, that you would have been a bad mother,” she says at last.

  “I knew Libby would make a better mother. At least I left you with a good woman.” I stab the fork into the golden fluff, lift out a forkful, put it on the right side of my mouth. “You okay? I’m not so okay. I feel nervous.”

  Amber runs her fingers along the edge of her nose, not because of an itch, but because it’s her way of manifesting a thought.

  “So you’re in fifth grade. And Libby is a nurse?”

  “She’s a real nurse now. Just recently. She was a nurse’s aide for a long time, but then she spent two years driving to Denver for classes. She works at the assisted care place. The only one around here.”

  “Amber? Can I hug you? Just a quick hug?”

  She gives a shrug and nods, and so I go up and hold her to me. She smells like honey and feels about as hollow as a bird. I close my eyes and duck my head enough that I can press my scraped cheek against her soft brown hair. It’s softer than mine, even. I hold this moment, hugging this younger me that still has a chance. Like me, she’s got a small tremor going through her, and I do feel a pang of sorrow that I’m causing this kid confusion and hurt. A new theory goes flying into my head: A person’s best chance of forgiveness rests with a child, perhaps, but no one should take advantage of that fact.

  She backs away from me before I’m ready, and we stand in an unwieldy silence. “Do you want to talk? Tell me about your life?” I clear my throat and start again. This is so hard for me, to keep words going. “Or do homework? Or what do you normally do now? Maybe I could help you with it. No stress, though. I don’t want to stress you out. Whatever you want to do. I’m cool. This doesn’t have to be some big huge traumatic conversation. Although, at the same time, it seems important. So, I’m just trying to . . .” But my words have run out; I have nothing more to say.

  She stares at me, blinks. “I have chores. Then I relax. Then I do homework. That’s what I usually do when I get off the bus. Usually Dad or Mom is here, but this is the first year that I can be left alone now, I’m old enough. For a little bit.”

  “Does that scare you? To be left alone?”

  She pauses. “Sometimes. The house makes weird noises. But I have Ringo.”

  “Kay used to leave us alone. All the time.”

  “I know. Mom told me. Kay was an alcoholic. Is an alcoholic.” She unclasps a barrette and twists a bit of brown hair in her finger and then resets the barrette and snaps it. I remember Libby playing with my hair. Braids and twists and strange, random creations. I remember how I felt like a cat, purring, whenever she touched my scalp, that I thought it was one of the best feelings in the world. And Libby loved it because my hair was softer, finer, and since she couldn’t have it, she said, at least she could play with it. “Mom says that when kids are abused, that they grow up to be adults who think, well, that somehow love is mixed up with hurt. So they keep looking for people who hurt them. Or ways to be hurt. So that they feel alive.”

  I touch my cheek, smile to myself. “I guess your mom tells you a lot, huh?”

  Her eyes shift away from me, her gaze locks on the mountains outside the kitchen window. “Ten-year-olds know about as much as grown-ups. Sometimes they just don’t have the experience or the words. My mom thinks it’s best to speak the truth, if at all possible. She says that you got messed up by Kay. That you drank a lot of alcohol and then did drugs and then sold drugs. And it’s all because—”

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s always the mom’s fault.”

  She sucks in her cheek. “Well, sometimes it is.” Then she reaches out and touches my arm. Maybe to see if I’m real. “Kay was mean to you. Very mean. She’s an okay grandma, though. She can be grumpy, but she’s got good parts too.”

  “She’s improved?”

  “She’s calmed down. That’s what my mom says.”

  “She still living with Baxter?”

  She considers this. Bites on her lip and twitches her nose, and I realize that that’s a tic of hers. Leans on the kitchen counter. After a bit, she says, “My parents didn’t tell you anything?”

  “No. We didn’t have that much time to talk.”

  She puts down her fork, drinks some milk, wipes her forearm across her mouth. I really did forget what it’s like to have those big front teeth that don’t quite fit your face. But she’s going to be beautiful; I was beautiful, I really was, and she looks like a softer version of me.

  “Baxter died. Or passed, if you want me to say it that way. About a year ago.” Here she stops to look at me, and I realize that she’s probably thinking the exact same thing I am, trying to gauge how human I am. Does this news hurt or not?

  “Oh, okay.” I put down my plate, pick it up, put it down again. “I didn’t know that.” For her benefit, I add, “Good ol’ Baxter.” I touch my heart and tap it. “He was a nut. A real nut. He sort of raised us. When Kay was on a binge or just not doing a very good job of it all. Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Amber examines her hand and then fingers it, running the tip of her finger down each rise of bone. A tear lands on the back of her hand, which she rubs in as well. “I miss him a lot. He was so nice to me. He left his ranch to that place . . . The Nature Conservancy. But Kay has the house and a few acres. She likes living there. She’s sick, though—”

  Tess smiles, watches herself as if from above,

  zooming up to see her own self from different perspectives.

  Right now, Tess notices that Tess feels like a dog,

  thrusting its nose into someone’s crotch.

  Not wanting to lose potential love or attention.

  Tess used to feel the same way about Baxter.

  Wanting to hold his kind attention.

  She never told him that, never told him goodbye.

  I dig my fingernails into my wrist. “Sick with what?”

  She scans the house, as if scanning her brain for the right words. “She stepped on a board with nails in it, and one went almost clear through her foot. This was last year. When she went in, it was all infected. So she was on antibiotics. And she would have been fine. But then she went into the river. She was fishing, and she waded in.”

  “The Arkansas?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s wrong with walking in the river? I used to all the time.”

  “Well, she got these bumps on her leg. And that’s called staph.”

  “Oh, boy. I know about staph.”

  “Not this kind of staph. It’s new. It’s like that kind you get in hospitals, but worse.”

  “Is that true? A new strain?”


  “Yes.” She looks at her feet, as if they might be contaminated. “It’s the kind that antibiotics don’t work on. So she was in the hospital in Denver for a long time. Getting drugs through her arm. I got to go to Denver. I saw the botanic gardens and the art museum and the mint, where they make money.”

  I have a sudden vacuum of a realization. All these places are places I took Alejandra to when she was about this age. My other daughter, the one I chose to bring into my life. I recover from the recoil and glance back at Amber. “So why is she still sick, then? After all that?”

  “The staph keeps coming back. It won’t . . . it just won’t die.”

  “And she’s home now?”

  “She lives in Baxter’s old house. She’s ready to die now. She won’t go back to the hospital. She’s got a bunch of big ugly sores. It’s probably the grossest thing you’ll ever see. Either Mom or Dad goes over there every morning and every night, to hook up the antibiotics to the IV. My mom scrapes off her skin once a week.” She takes a bit of cake and then regards it and takes another bite. “It tastes okay if you pretend it’s not supposed to be cake. If you just tell yourself that it’s some French dessert you never heard of, then you can enjoy it.”

  A laugh dripfaucets out of me. “You’re funny.”

  “My parents say it’s all in your perception of a thing. If I don’t perceive it as cake, it’s good. If I perceive you as a new acquaintance, and not a mother, then I can be friendly and suspicious of you at the same time. Which is appropriate.”

  I reach out to touch her arm. “Clearly, you are very smart. You’re already better set for the world than I ever was.” I don’t say: this is exactly what I wanted to know.

  Amber considers this. “But that doesn’t for sure make me a good person. The trick is to be both smart and kind.” She digs out a piece of cake from her tooth with her tongue. “Let’s sit at the table.”

  We sit, and I trace the pattern of the bright tablecloth with my finger. A zigzag of red, a line of blue. “I don’t know where you got your brains from. Not Simon. Not me.”

  “My mom has always said you were smart. She says you were always inventing words and also coming up with theories on life, that you liked to look at big brushstrokes. Those are her words. She said that you couldn’t ever be shallow, but you wanted to be. You could see big-picture stuff. You could be fierce. That’s a simple fact. You just didn’t care.”

  I eat more of the not-cake. It’s more like a flat white honey biscuit, and some of it gets stuck in the missing-tooth gap, which stings, but my tongue cleans it out, runs itself gently over the hurt. “Amber, I don’t know how you feel about me being here. I feel like you’re being very brave. I feel like you’re being very generous. Thank you. But if you don’t want to be, well, I’ll leave if you want. You’re the boss right now. But I’d like to stay and hang out for a bit.”

  She headtilts and regards me. “How long?”

  “How long will I stay?” I give her a calm look, which is a lie, a coverup for all the lightning going on underneath. “A coupla days?”

  Tess’s STUPID FUCKING nerves

  attacking her again at random:

  throat closing up,

  pounding heart,

  dry mouth

  can’t breathe.

  I pop my neck and think: It depends, Amber. It depends on you. Because a gal can only be strong for so long, and sometimes she just needs to be saved. By someone who cares. Libby, for instance, the one person who helped. She helped in little ways while I grew up. She helped in big ways, by taking my daughter so I could get the hell out of here. So, you see, I’m asking for help without deserving it. And if you say no, well, then I have my Last Resort card in my back pocket.

  “There are no extra rooms here,” she says, and then, because I’m spacing out, she says it again.

  “Okay.” But I’m thinking: Do you see, Amber? It’s my Last Resort backpocket card that keeps me trudging on in life, and coming home was the last thing I needed to do before I could play it. But now that it’s down to the wire, I find that I’m scared. Afraid to pull it, afraid to play it.

  “And I don’t want to share my bedroom.”

  “Okay. I totally get that.”

  “Maybe you could stay with Kay?”

  “Maybe.”

  We both startle when a treebranch hits the roof. The wind is picking up. Her eyebrows suddenly furrow, and she stands. “Do you smell smoke? No one should be burning ditches.”

  I follow her outside the door, and we scan the horizon, our eyes squinted against the wind. There are dry grasslands to the north and to the east, a field of milo to the south, and the dim outline of mountains in the far distance to the west, the haze of the brown cloud that hangs in the atmosphere from all the pollution from the Front Range.

  Tess sometimes thinks:

  You may not be clued in to the earth

  But the earth is clued in to you.

  I take a few steps away from the house so I can see the horizon. “It feels like a hundred degrees out here. It’s always been too hot here on the plains. That’s why I like the mountains.” I look off to them, which is where the sun is hanging. “And the angle of the sun. It’s so hard this time of year. It’s always in your eyes. It smells like someone is burning out a ditch, or burning trash in a burn barrel.”

  Tess’s body grows quiet

  and the world does too.

  Tess knows this feeling.

  It’s when the universe is trying to tell her something,

  and she needs to hold still and listen.

  “Oh, wow,” I say, my brain making vague connections. “I heard on the radio earlier in the day, when I was making that cake, there’s a wildfire in the mountains. That’s what we smell. That’s why it’s so hazy.”

  “We can smell a wildfire in the mountains from here?”

  “Yes. I think that’s it.”

  “But it’s so far away.”

  “Well, it’s a pretty big fire. That’s where I used to live. Those mountains. The haze is going to make the sunset so pretty, so red. All the particles in the air. What a mess. Colorado, I mean. Every year now, it burns.”

  She turns to face the blue outline of mountains. “But it won’t get to us.”

  I look at her, touch her shoulder. “Oh, no, that’s impossible. It’s very far away. But the smoke travels on windy days. See how the wind is coming straight from the west?”

  “I want to do my chores.” She walks across the driveway to a cement water tank, turns it on, bends over to watch the water burble through the hose and into the cement rectangle. That reminds me of Ed’s fruit trees, and I turn to see him moving the water on them again and then turning to watch the mountains himself.

  Once the water is going, Amber turns around and stares at me, as if I’m supposed to walk over there too. So I do. When I come up from behind her, she points to the cows that are wandering slowly toward us. Their knees look like huge knots in a tree. “This is Franny and Zooey,” she says, nodding to the cows. “These cows both had calves this spring. But it’s fall now, and we need to wean and sell them. The other ones we’re keeping, though. For milk.”

  I stare at the cow that comes forward to get a scratch from Amber. The other cow dips her nose into the tank, raises it, nuzzles the first with a nose still trickling water, and then head-butts the first cow out of the way for her own scratch. As I watch Amber laugh and lean forward so that she can reach the other, I start humming.

  Humming because I am now out of words, of strength, worn down from meeting my daughter, and I’m just now seeing that perhaps I shouldn’t have come at all—it’s too hard once a heart has been met by another. I also wonder at Amber’s willingness to speak to me at all, wonder if it comes from shock—it’s too hard to be gruff and angry when you’re not prepared. I stop humming, clear my throat. Still, I must try. I hug my arms to my chest. “Was that hard, in earlier years? Selling the calves?”

  She eyes the mountains. “Wow, look at th
e sky. It’s turning red. That’s gonna be the prettiest sunset ever.” She looks at me, surprised, as if I’m the one responsible for it, and then adds, “Well, weaning calves, it’s part of life.”

  “True enough. Every living thing in this world gets weaned eventually. Right?”

  She considers that. “Maybe not humans.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Naw. Even my mom needs to know her mom is okay.” She turns to consider me and then looks back at the setting sun, a bright red globe hanging over the mountains and sending sprawling oranges and reds spiking in all directions and lighting up the few clouds that are above us in a deeporange glow. “Maybe some humans don’t need their mamas. But most do.”

  PART II

  * * *

  Water

  Chapter Six

  People regularly ask forgiveness for the sins they commit, but they often don’t ask forgiveness for the things they neglected to do. But those are sins too. Perhaps they are the greatest sins of all.

  *

  Redemption is found in the most unusual of activities, and so when Amber says her homework is something she can handle easily, on my own (which means I need a moment to myself ), I go to the kitchen to make a salad.

  Redemption is found in love, and if you want to know if you’re a loving person, ask the person you’re with if they feel loved.

  Redemption is found in remembrance. I remember Alejandra. She was far off in the distance when I first saw her, a broad brush-stoke of humanchild in the middle of hugedesert. (Like Amber, a backpack on her shoulders. Unlike Amber, she was standing alone when I first saw her, alone in a verystill verydangerous world.) When I parked the pickup and walked toward her, I could see the basic situation: a group of humans huddled under the branches of a mesquite tree. They’d snapped off creosote branches and were huddled below them, to make a canopy, to conceal, to console, and I was thinking of how similar it was to a rattlesnake, curling around sage in order to stay cool.