Red Lightning

by Laura Pritchett

  “So it’s enough? To . . . I don’t know, fill you up? Do you know what I mean?”

  She looks at me, straight on. “Of course I do. You’re not the only one who feels empty, you know. Sometimes I get lonely. Sometimes it still feels like something is missing. The Buddhists say life is suffering. But that’s a bad translation. They mean unsettled. To want more. To be seeking. For a while, I thought it might be a kid of my own. To carry a baby and then hold it. But I couldn’t. We tried to have a baby, and we couldn’t. So, see, Amber was a real gift.”

  My eyebrows move up on their own, my hand reaches out to grab The Odyssey to my heart. “Oh, wow. I didn’t know.”

  “How could you? You’ve been gone ten years with no way to stay in touch. And just so you know, I quit asking for a well-being check from the police. I was afraid it would just get you in trouble. I knew by instinct you were fine and wanted to be left alone.”

  The potatoes are thinly sliced, burbling around in hot oil. I stab my fork into one, bring it out onto a paper towel, salt it. My stomach feels unsure of food. I tap my chest, hard. “There’s a monster that lives there. It feels like there’s actually something inside. Anxiety, I suppose. It used to just be in the mornings. Now it’s all day.”

  She looks at me, blinks her doebrown eyes. “That’s where I feel it too. There’s medicine to help with that, you know. And counseling. Meditation. Things you can do.”

  I hand her a plate of potatoes and an omelet and chew a bite myself, gingerly, as if eating it slowly might not hurt my teeth, might make my stomach more accepting. “I guess I didn’t know that the emptiness could just . . . I don’t know . . . get deeper and deeper. I assumed there was an end to it. I’ve learned one thing, which is that one should never assume anything. Sometimes I missed Kay, if that’s possible. I didn’t literally miss her, but I missed her in the abstract. As in, there were a few nights here and there where I wanted a mother. Someone to hold me and sing lullabies. And you. I missed you.”

  She chews more slowly, wondering, perhaps, if I can be believed. Then she nods.

  “I know you haven’t forgiven me.”

  “You never asked.” She tilts her head at me, questioning. “I missed you. For a couple of years. I wondered how you were doing. Sometimes I was angry. You never called or texted or emailed, and so I stopped waiting. I stopped looking out the window, hoping to see a truck pull up and you jump out. I wasn’t angry, either, till you showed up. You became dead to me, I guess. So it’s weird to see you again. It was . . . tough. To see you.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  She finishes her breakfast, stands up to clear her plate into a bucket that says ChiKEN SCRapS on it with marker in kid handwriting. “I guess that’s the only thing I really want to know. I mean, I have a million questions. But if I only got one, I would like to be clear on how long. What’s your plan here? What about this fire? We need to talk about this.”

  The coffee must be kicking in, my head is clearing. “The honest truth, Libby, is that I’ll be going soon. There is trouble . . . I didn’t know that when I came here. Honestly. I just thought that I didn’t find the pollos, and so I came here, and then my plan was to see you for three or so days, and then disappear again.”

  “Where?”

  I pause. Shrug. “I don’t know. I guess it depended on how things went here. I guess I needed to see if I had a home. But now you and Ed know about the fire. I just don’t know . . . There are things . . . I can’t really put words to them . . . How guilty am I? I don’t even know. I was supposed to pick up a group of people. I couldn’t find them. They started a signal fire. That fire is out of control. I don’t know what that means. But I’m not staying much longer. I wanted to come to say goodbye. Out of love. And respect. And, well, this is the hard one for me. To ask forgiveness.”

  “Okay, then.” Her voice is very soft, and she looks above my head, deciding something, and then back at my eyes. Here we are, two sisters, staring at one another. Simple, real, open. “You don’t exactly deserve this, Tess,” she says. “I think there’s probably more to the story. But I do have a secret. Something real. A surprise for you.” Her smile is sad, but still she winks and stands up. “Ed will tell you all about it. And show you. Because I want to be here when Amber wakes up. So that we can talk. For real. Without you here. Because she is my first priority. About whatever she is feeling about you and your return. But Ed is going to tell you something. And Tess? I hope you’re worthy.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Ed eats his breakfast standing, leaning against the kitchen counter, and says seriously but also playfully, knowing he’ll annoy me, “I’m grateful for the chickens who gave us the eggs, for the sun and water, for the wheat and corn that fed the chickens, for the earth that provided the nutrients for this particular potato, for the space here to make our own food, and to you for making it, Tess.” When I smile, he adds, “And that is not all goofy crap. That is real gratefulness. Now, Tess, let’s take a walk.”

  “Well, is that negotiable? I don’t feel so good—” I’m not going to tell them about Alejandra. That she was in the group I was to pick up. That she likely started the fire. That she is gone. I push it down deep, deep, so that I can have this final day. The time limit is the only thing that makes it possible.

  “Nonnegotiable.”

  “I didn’t actually sleep—”

  “—It will be about a mile. I’ll bring water. I have something to show you. Something important. You owe us that much. One walk.”

  I glance toward Libby for confirmation that I need to do this, but she’s doing dishes, purposefully avoiding my gaze. I wander over to the door, where shoes are stacked, and lace up some of her tennis shoes. The blisters on my feet haven’t yet healed, and they’ll open back up now, but it doesn’t matter.

  Ed sets his plate on the counter, escorts me out the door, and guides me west, toward the distant and hazy mountains. He lifts his ballcap off, pushes the glasses to his face, runs his hand through his sandy-curly hair. The sky is brilliant blue, the grasses turned into a dry-golden, the row of cottonwoods even more golden.

  “Not so smoky today,” I venture, look at him sideways.

  “No.”

  “Maybe it’s calming?”

  “No. Just checked. Moving fast. I would prefer not to talk about this particular tragedy . . . at this particular time. There’s nothing we can do at the moment. Except to say that all our actions have consequences, that everything we do puts a chain of events into action, and for that reason, Tess, we have to be careful. We have to be aware and careful.”

  “But sometimes a person has to stand up and make a choice. Make a firm decision and act. Not knowing if it’s the right thing for sure. Hoping, though.”

  “Yes.”

  “And sometimes that person is wrong. Accidentally makes the wrong choice.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t talk as much as you used to. I remember you being a weird-talker. All philosophy, in stops-and-starts and looping in weird directions. I remember the first time Libby and I met you, when we walked into Ideal Grocery to buy candy after high school let out, and there you were, pulling into the parking lot in your orange VW bus, and Libby said something like, There’s two kinds of folks around here, the ranching kind and the escape-people-hippie kind, and this dude is that second kind, which just proved to be true, because we saw you unloading boxes of bottled honey to sell.”

  “You have a good memory.” He waves his arm aimlessly in the air. “Look. Last night’s wind took down so many leaves.” It’s true: the blooms of yellow that had been floating in trees are now on the ground, where they’re floating in a different way. The cottonwoods still have leaves waving like small flags, triumphant that they’re still holding on. “Amber comes out here. She likes climbing them. If I remember right, you used to talk a lot less. You’ve been surprisingly talkative.”

  I glance up at the spread of branches along an old creek bed that’s dried up, the tree
s being the evidence of the ancient paths of water.

  He pushes his glasses up on his nose and keeps walking. After a while, he says, “We’re going to the house I lived in when I first met your family.” He adjusts his glasses. “That house I lived in back when you were here last. I don’t know if you know this, but I had lived in El Salvador for a while. In a small village in rebel-controlled territories, worked with the FMLN. I wanted to do something that mattered, so that I would matter. I snuck in solar-powered generators for radios. It’s a long story, there was a solidarity movement in those days . . . Anyway, in the end, I just got my heart broken.”

  “By a woman?”

  At this, he laughs sincerely. “That’s exactly what Libby asked me when I told her this story. No, not by a woman. By everything else. Because I wanted to make a difference, and I realized I wasn’t helping much, or maybe I was, who knows, but I felt so small. Maybe it was the first time I’d realized how much suffering there was, and my efforts were so minor compared to what someone with power could do.”

  The wind blows a little, Tess feels the shift in her hair.

  She’ll miss that.

  The grass rolls like waves.

  She’ll miss that too.

  The clouds boiling up over the mountains. They’ll meander this way, toward Tess, toward the plains.

  They’ll release hail or rain or lightning, or, more likely, only drift on past.

  Ed glances at me, sideways. “So I moved out here. So that I could feel like enough again. I needed to be invisible for a while. Just like you do, as the levantona. That’s a real trick. The balance between being seen and unseen. Pollos need to be unseen so that they can start a new life and not be invisible. Acquire enough substance to build a life. But because they’re trying to be invisible, they’re not. Do you know, for example, that most of the immigrants get nabbed because of routine traffic stops? And did you know that most of those were caught by la migra on Highway 160, between Durango and Alamosa? The INS agents know it, and so do the coyotes. So why, I wonder, were you there?”

  I breathe in, glance sideways. “It’s not the INS anymore. It’s ICE.”

  He sighs, annoyed. “I know that.”

  “They go north now. They go back roads, into Utah, then over. I-70. Drug drops right in Mormon territory. Right where you’d least expect it. But this group, I don’t know. I was told to go there. An old spot we used to use—”

  “Tess. Stop. I’m asking. Was anything about this pickup special?”

  I shake my head, no.

  He looks at me, genuinely curious. “You didn’t know who the pickup was?”

  I shake my head, no again. The shaking causes the world to spin, and the leaves that are falling seem to be falling in three dimensions, a spiral within a spiral.

  Seasick is what I feel like. I look down, hoping to find my landfeet, looking for grounding. The sun is deafening now. I kick at a couple of leaves, sending them springing into the air.

  “I built this house—” and here, he waves his hand at a structure I see in the far distance. “I built it by hand. By myself. One adobe brick at a time. Had no idea what I was doing. Learned as I went. Back when I was hurting and needing to feel again.”

  I give one good kick to a clump of grass underfoot. “You seem . . . good now.”

  “Emotions come back when you get calm enough to let them.”

  He scratches his jaw, stops, looks down, bends over and picks up a globe of what looks like gray tissue paper. “Wasp nest. They chew up leaves and bark and spit it out, and look what they make.” He looks up at the cottonwood, where I suppose this was once sitting, the whole time balancing it gently in his palm, the fingers curved up around, holding it. Gray and hollow, like a skull.

  I reach over and poke at the nest. How soft it is, as if maybe it’s made from barely-hanging-together dust.

  He glances over at me, keeps walking, looking off into the distance. He holds the wasp nest in one hand, like a god holding the globe of the earth. “The empty isn’t going to fill up like magic, Tess.” He stops, looks at me. “And it doesn’t fill up with drink and drugs, either. It fills up by having a purpose. At least spend some time with Amber. Just for her sake, fake it. Do not break that kid’s heart.”

  I shake my head, no.

  “Well, when you do leave, look her in the eye. Say goodbye. And make her understand, in her heart, that you’re not leaving because of her. Okay? You got that?” He looks at me until I nod. “You could lose your family for real, you know. I’m not sure you’ve ever considered that. You left and you’ve been gone, and I’m guessing that all this time, you took it for granted that they’d still be here. If this shit ever hit the fan. Which it has. Be careful, Tess. What you do or say next . . .” He sighs. “Whatever you do next will have big consequences. Please be careful. Please try to think beyond yourself.”

  I won’t let him catch my eye, and so he tosses the nest gently to the ground and points toward the structure that has just come into view again. It’s a small round home, stucco on the outside, another Earthship, but smaller and plain. Like the other, it’s surrounded by a dirt driveway and a line of trees and a few little outbuildings. “This is what I want to show you.”

  “You still have that orange VW bus? Parked out here? That’s what you had when I lived here.”

  As we near, Ed touches my shoulder and turns me to him. It startles me, and I pull back, but he pulls me close again, gently. He waits until I look him in the eyes. “Friends stay here now.” He squeezes my shoulders, tight. “It’s funny. How bits of people gather in us. Isn’t it? Listen. One thing. It’s one thing to be invisible. And another to be un pelagato—a nobody. It’s a fine line. It’s as fine as the dust of that wasp nest. Fine as each layer. Nobody is a pelagato. Nobody, not one single human, is a nobody.”

  He wants something from me, so I nod. Yes. Fine. Yes.

  “Do you understand? So treat yourself, and treat them, like the invisible people you currently need to be. Invisible, but not a nobody. You understand the difference?”

  The intensity of his voice makes me realize that what he’s saying is as essential as my heartbeat. My face flushes. I look toward the home and realize something is out of whack. There is laundry. A pump with a small puddle of water on the ground. A group of chickens that scatter away. Then I make out a few people, who move inside as soon as they see us, except one. A young woman with a ponytail of the finest black hair. A startled face. The bloom of a smile.

  Chapter Thirteen

  My stomach caves, and I’m trying for oxygen between heaves. Ed is catching me underneath my armpits as I fall with a whoa now and he is dragging me over to a tree, which he leans me against once he’s got me in the shade. Before I can suck in air again, there are arms wrapped around me and lo siento, ay, lo siento, and a wet cloth, and Ed’s hand on my forehead.

  It can’t be.

  My eyes dart at Ed, back to a young woman’s startled face. She’s grown up now, a woman, the curves of her face defined into sharper angles.

  Ed whispers something at me, and it startles me enough to send me back against the tree bark. “Feel it, Tess. That swoosh of the heart. That’s life. That is worth living for.”

  Alejandra.

  I lean forward, my head between my legs. They are alive. I look up and bring them into focus. Alejandra. Now the age I was when I left here, smiling timidly at me, crooked eyeteeth, and there is Lupe, her mother, soft hands, as soft as a wasp nest, fluttering across my face. Behind them is a cluster of men—about five of them—and I am hearing, the fire, we were scared, we were alone, and then I see it in Lupe’s expression: they think I’m angry.

  Alejandra, longglossyblackhair Alejandra, dimpleandcrookedeyeteeth Alejandra.

  She puts out her arms to hold me.

  I let out a moan that is not me. It is a moan of the universe.

  Déjà vu: Me looking at Libby across the parking lot, wanting to put my arms out but not sure she would be that forgiving. />
  “No nos odies por el fuego. We thought we were going to die,” Alejandra says as she nears, holds my eyes in hers. “It was that close.” Her voice is fluid, and her eyes are steady. “We were so thirsty. We were dying. I started the fire so someone would see us. It was small. Oh, Tess. We put on dried branches for the smoke. I thought it would go out. We had waited for the pick-up person. We didn’t know it was to be you. No nos odies por el incendio que causamos . . . We called one last number, then we called the police to turn ourselves in.” She tilts her head slightly at Ed. “The only other number we thought we could call. The one you taught me, Tess.”

  “No entiendo.” The world starts spinning again, and I tilt over, and Ed holds me against the tree, mumbles something, touches my forehead. Then I am being held by Alejandra. Rocked by someone. Someone is feeling my pulse, touching my neck, touching my forehead. “You have a fever,” Ed is saying quietly. “A high fever.”

  I close my eyes to bring the scattered bits together. I look to Ed first.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He bends down, looks at me in the eyes, waits until I hold his gaze. “We were waiting to see what your plans were. What you were doing here, what you were about.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We crisscrossed. You were on the bus here, and I was on my way there. Do you see? I had been driving like a maniac to the mountains. I didn’t know about the fire either, that it was blazing into that fire, not until you told me.”

  Behind him, murmurings. “Por favor, Tess, perdónanos. No nos odies por el fuego, nos estábamos muriendo de sed.”

  Lupe walks forward, takes my hand. “No íbamos a vivir más que un par de horas.” Her voice is flat. “Teníamos tanta sed. Encendimos el fuego.” She turns and walks away, limping.

  Alejandra’s voice is the opposite, full of calm kindness. “Ay, Tess, no sabíamos que ibas a ser tú quien nos encontrará. We had to leave the mota y coca. It’s all burned. That man is going to be very angry.”

  I close my eyes. The world is getting dark. I hear a voice, my own voice. “But I can’t understand this . . .”