Red Lightning

by Laura Pritchett

  Chapter Twenty

  Alejandra pulls up the sleeves of her yellow fleece jacket so that she can show me her wrists. They’re rubbed raw, bruised, in places welted and in other places scratched like my cheek. I wince, run my finger alongside the wounds. “And inside? Your heart?”

  We’re sitting under the same cottonwood outside the old Earthship, settling ourselves down among the roots. The clouds have rambled on, and the sun’s afternoon gold is rolling out across the land. I look at the curve of our knees, our shoes on the yellow leaves. Her moccasins and my red tennis shoes make me think of all the traveling we have done.

  She leans her head against my shoulder, holds my hand. “That will take some time. I miss Oscar.”

  “Yes.” My voice feels as worn and soft as a wasp nest. “I’m so sorry.”

  “We were going to make a home together. I’m tired of looking for a home.”

  “Well, there’s here. There’s me.”

  She laces her fingers with mine. “Yes, perhaps. For a while.” Then she adds, “I can’t stop thinking of the fire. I believe I’ll feel guilty for the rest of my life.”

  I bring her fingers to my mouth and kiss her knuckles. “We need to fix this. This running back and forth, these countries that make a person do such a thing. There needs to be a better way.”

  We both nod, quiet in the thoughts of our small selves within this large canvas. Finally, I sigh. “Will you be okay? Amber and I are going into Lamar for therapy. Together and separately. It will be important. I worry that she’ll become hard, like me, and so will you.”

  She looks up at me, smiles. “We have Libby’s trained hand, Ed’s wisdom, your streetsmarts. We were going to drive off, you know. Go to Minnesota or Montana or who knows! Just go and go. But then we realized, I think, that no one would know. We were still a secret. Even after all this. And driving that van might be more dangerous than sticking close. I think you taught us that, once. How sometimes the safest place to be is right near the danger.”

  I gaze off across the land. Amber’s 4-H cows have wandered from the pasture near the house and into this one, and one is close up, knees folded under hulking body. She stops chewing her cud long enough to reach her tongue up and lick out her nose. “They’re investigating, of course. But we are all on one page on how the story goes, and it does not involve you. The truth except for the part that involves all of you.” I hold her hand. “You could stay, you know. Help with Kay’s house. Because, you know, Kay wanted to use the house and acreage for something good. Perhaps it can become another secret safe house, for example. For the lost and found among us. It’s perfect. So remote.”

  We talk of the future, then. They plan on staying, she tells me, for at least a while. But given that every human wants to do something of value, and that simply sitting and waiting and hiding will never be enough, their departure might come soon. “Perhaps mi madre will stay and raise chickens and help with the bees. But the rest of us. I think we want to move on into our lives. Kay’s will be a good place for all the broken things that need to heal. But we’ll see. Something else is calling to me. I need to listen. I just don’t know what I’m hearing quite yet.”

  My lips open, and I want to say something to her. Something I have always wanted to say but could not find or invent the right words. Something about the vacuum of a realization that fell into my heart the moment I saw her. Something about how if we listen harder, stare harder, focus harder, use our imaginations harder, the people at the other end of our sight, well, they morph from blurs on the horizon, something barely discernible at a distance, and become very clear, very detailed. How all of us, each of us, are waving our arms, trying to attract attention. Our hands are cupped around our mouths in a whistle. Our faces are red from the effort. We are wanting to tell our story, be specific, to share a language. We only need someone to see and to listen and to feel, and our shapes take form.

  I pull her toward me and finger her black hair, twisting it and then letting it spiral out, and then, as she used to say as a child, repeatifying it. She curls against me and naps, and the earth beneath us seems solid and firm and unchanging. The land is enough to hold us. All the land, it seems, is here to hold us.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Slade’s hospital room smells like lemon and sage, and he’s in the wheelchair with a dufflebag on his lap and a nurse holding up medicine bottles, one by one, and explaining. Underneath his flannel shirt are broken ribs and a gunshot wound that turned out to be a bad scrape and tissue damage. The wound looks like a crack in the dirt, the lines on a map, and as I gingerly touched the area yesterday, I thought, Yet another example of how so much depends on such a small fraction of a moment.

  I lean against the wall and watch him while he signs papers and gets instructions. He runs his hand along the edge of his beard every time he looks overwhelmed or confused. He wants out, the big baby. Terrified he’ll get a staph infection there, having heard about Kay’s trauma. Terrified because he’s never been good at being in closed spaces and small rooms.

  He couldn’t believe it, he told me when I first visited him, he just couldn’t believe it when Lobo showed up with Lupe and Alejandra and the others. He was fishing at the dam, having a beer and sitting in a lawn chair, when all of a sudden he got clocked over the head with a rock. While he was falling, in that fraction of a moment, he looked up and saw Lobo, and Lobo said, “I put a sticker GPS locator on your truck, you fool. I’d never trust you. You’re too good to be trusted,” and Slade thought, I need to prepare to die.

  Lobo believed we had staged the whole thing. That Slade or I had started the fire and taken off with the product. Lobo had used the GPS locator sticker on Slade’s pickup to get our general vicinity. While driving up and down the county roads, he came across a unique glassed home, and they stopped to rob it, figuring money or art or something valuable would be inside. Indeed, there was. Because the girl who came out of the door had tried to move toward the danger by saying, “If you’re looking for Tess, then you should know that she’s quit this business,” which was just enough information for him to chase her into the house and around the table, grab her, and put her in the truck. In the end, she’d learned enough from climbing cottonwood trees in the pasture and overhearing tidbits of conversation to know that someone was hiding out at the old Earthship house, and so, desperate for her life, she directed Lobo there. And Alejandra, once caught, also desperate for her life, directed them to the old house, where they found Slade’s note to me. Now they had everyone they needed to hold ransom. It was like a treasure hunt. Clues being left here and there, all of us pirates, seeking our own version of treasure.

  *

  As soon as the nurse gives me the nod, I walk toward Slade in his scruffle-bearded handsome wonder. Sure enough, his eyes light when he sees me. I bend down and hug him. “Ready to get outta here?”

  He grunts, pats my back, meaning, he’s too close to tears to be able to speak.

  “The germs are coming to get you,” I tease, fluttering my hands at him. But he is in pain, and so I touch his cheeks and kiss him tenderly. Something I’ve never seen startles me, which is a slow drip of tears running down the crease of his nose.

  I use my thumbs to smear in the smooth silk of water into the landscape of his face.

  Dr. Lemon steps in the room. “You both got your meds? You are both coming back tomorrow?” He means the antianxiety pills he prescribed, he means the trauma counseling we are signed up for in the coming days. His voice is chirpy, and there is a light in his eyes despite the words. “Like I said yesterday, people don’t shoot one another and go on with their lives as if nothing happened. You have work to do, my friends.” With that, he nods at the little computer he carries with him on his rounds and darts off.

  I wheel Slade around the corridors until we reach the entrance, the nurse following behind. Once we’re through the doors, he has to stand so she can take the chair back. I hold him at the elbow and guide him toward the parking lot. “B
axter was always offering me good wisdoms, some of which are only starting to make sense now,” I tell him as we shuffle along. “Once he told me, ‘The young in the world are crazy for light and the old are afraid it’s leaving them.’ I like that. I wonder about the middle, though. The light we’re grasping for is a bit like noon, isn’t it? Hard light, but we sure appreciate it.”

  He shuffles along, clearly in pain and on drugs, until we make it to Kay’s truck. “I think it’s hard noon now, because my ribs hurt.” He chuckles, winces. “So, to Kay’s house?”

  “Till you’re off the pain meds.” I stand in front of him so that he can’t yet maneuver himself into the truck. I reach up to stroke his chin, the scruffle that borders shaven territory from unshaven. “Before we go to Kay’s, I have to tell you something. I have to do it now, or I won’t have the courage to do it at all.”

  “I know what you’re going to say, Tess—”

  “Well, let me say it anyway. I need to learn to use the words. Slade, I used to believe that love just came to you. That it wasn’t love if you had to work for it. But that’s not true, is it? I’m just now understanding that. For some reason, I thought that if you worked for it, it wasn’t real.”

  He cups my chin, tilts it, holds my gaze. Hoists an eyebrow. “I’m not sure that rules me out, though.”

  A yellowjacket flies by us, and I bat it away from him. Above us, the geese are migrating south, their calls a language something half-whispered and half-sung. “Maybe it doesn’t make sense. But many things don’t make sense, I’m realizing. I have to learn how to feel. I have to do that alone. When I drove out of here ten years ago, I think I was trying to make life fit my idea of what it was supposed to be. To bend it to the idea that I had in mind. But then I made life give and take more than it could.”

  He looks over my shoulder at the horizon. “You can see the mountains today. Did you notice that? They’re snowcapped. And don’t you think that those emotions are the sort of thing that grows? We’re war buddies, after all. People don’t go through this kind of stuff without . . . Don’t you think it would be nice to have someone who has seen the same shit? Who can care for you despite? It’s the dark corners, maybe, that we can most love?”

  I move my hands to rub the edge of his beard, his temples, push my hands into his hair. “Yes. Some love grows. I didn’t love Amber when I had her. I think I love her now, but I’m also too messed up to know. I need to settle. Settle in order to feel. That’s true for what I feel for you, too. I don’t suppose you want to come back in a year? Next fall, when the leaves are turning?”

  He runs his hands across my cheeks and smiles sadly. Holds me away from him so he can look me in the eyes and then holds me to him, rocks back and forth. “You sure do have some eyes there,” I hear him murmur. Then, “What do I have? About three days? Three days to convince you?”

  I laugh, the carbonated prayer type, and step back and kick at the black asphalt with the red tennis shoes. The cracks in the parking lot look like a map, like trails taking him somewhere new, and my crumble of asphalt goes tumbling along them. “No, you’re leaving. What will you do?”

  He sighs but smiles. “Move to Mexico. I’m not going to tell you where, though. I don’t want you to know, because then you’d feel obligated to keep a secret.” He reaches out and moves a bit of hair and tucks it behind my ear.

  I kick another crumble of asphalt. “Darlingsweet, I suppose we all need to start new lives somewhere.”

  He breathes out, resigned. “I’d like to write you, though. I’ll use Libby’s address, because no matter where you go now, you’ll stay in touch.”

  I nod. “Yes, that’s true.”

  “And you? I’m guessing that . . . killing . . . isn’t as easy to absorb as one would think. Even if he was a dangerous shithead . . . and he was, Tess, both the guy who was taking Alejandra to the truck and Lobo. I’m glad they’re dead. Those guys were messed up.”

  The sky is squawking with a clearblue that pulses light, just like on the day I arrived. “Yes. I want to let the winter come down around me and just . . . hold me. I need to make some peace. Connect myself. Put the puzzle pieces back together. Merge. Solidify. I need to find the ways to leave my worst self and find my better one. A unified better one.”

  I press my head into his chest, and we stand like this in the parking lot for a long time. How can I explain it? I need to find a path that leads to some sort of purpose, to mitigate the fact that the human race evolved or got plunked down to wonder and suffer and be afraid of death, and afraid of pain—afraid because we don’t know how to live this life, and not certain if we’re being judged, and if we are, by what elements? It’s in the wondering itself that I’ll find redemption in the red earth and the howl of coyotes and the blue sky.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Before I walk into the multisplendored house, with its bottles and cans and glass sparkling in the evening light, I stop to look west, toward the sunset with the waves of blue topped with streaks of orange and red. The heavens are humming, I think to myself, and later the sky will harden, but right now they are offering a soft, lilting music. I breathe in, a last call for bravery.

  As soon as I step into the door, I see Amber sitting at the kitchen table, piling items on the bright tablecloth. I pause, startled. She’s holding an old newspaper, and it strikes me as familiar, and I have to cock my head and listen to my memories in order to place it.

  Then I remember. When I first left, I did send Libby one package. I had gone into some touristy gift shop in Durango and bought a fake Durango Times where you could write your own headlines. The headline reads, TESS ESCAPES! and in smaller print below, KID SISTER CROSSES BORDER TO NEW LIFE! And then there is just random type, that makes no sense, and then there are smaller headlines, put there by the store: TWO-HEADED COW LEFT BY ALIENS, and BEAR ATTACKS CRIMINAL, HELPS POLICE.

  Amber looks up at me, then down at the large plastic box she’s holding. “Remember this?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is some stuff my mom saved.” She reaches her arm toward me, handing me a piece of notebook paper. I walk in the house and take it carefully from her. It’s Libby’s handwriting, one of her many lists, written while Amber bloomed in my stomach:

  REASONS I WANT TO ADOPT TESS’S BABY AFTER IT IS BORN:

  —BECAUSE TESS DIDN’T REALLY WANT TO HAVE AN ABORTION EVEN THOUGH SHE SAID IT WAS OKAY. PLUS WE DON’T HAVE THE MONEY. PLUS WE WERE SCARED.

  —BECAUSE IT WOULD MAKE TESS PROUD.

  —BECAUSE IT WOULD MAKE ME SPECIAL.

  —BECAUSE I WANT SOMETHING TO HAPPEN IN MY LIFE.

  —BECAUSE I WANT SOMEONE TO LOVE ME. JUST ME.

  —BECAUSE I DON’T KNOW WHAT MY LIFE IS ABOUT. ESPECIALLY IF IT’S NOT ABOUT TESS.

  —I WANT TO BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO REACH FOR SOMETHING TERRIFIC WHILE I HAVE THE CHANCE.

  —BECAUSE I KNOW TESS IS GOING TO LEAVE. AND MAYBE IF I KEEP HER BABY, SHE’LL STICK AROUND. OR COME BACK.

  I look up out the window, toward the mountains. “She was brave. And you are terrific.”

  Amber bites her lower lip, and her nose scrunches in response. “And you came back.”

  “Yes. And I’m staying through the winter, even if you and Ed and Libby are all mad at me, which you should be.”

  “For bringing all this holyhell here?”

  I laugh. For her made-up words, for her face, teasing. “Yes.”

  “For traumatizedsoul? For permanent-scar?”

  I take her hand. “We shouldn’t be laughing. It’s serious. Like I said before, you have to be careful what you witness. But then, look what I did to you! That’s one reason I want to stay, Amber. To see if I can be of any help. I’m so sorry.”

  Her face grows quiet. “Yes,” she says. “I haven’t been feeling so good. You’re right about what you see. But like you once told my mom, you have to be careful not to live a small life. We should all be living more dangerous lives, you said. If you get too careful, you get small.�
�� Then, “She’ll forgive you, maybe. If you stick around and are useful and giving for once. I’ll forgive you too. I think.”

  “Really? I’m not sure you know what that means—”

  She is interrupted by a sound from behind us, though, and I turn, expecting to see Ed or Libby. It is Alejandra, listening quietly from the door. “May I . . .?”

  I open my mouth to say something, but Amber is faster. “Hi, Alejandra.” She moves toward Alejandra, and they hug each other tight.

  Oh! Oh, yes, of course. Of course. I stare at them, startled by the sudden realization that they have gone through this together. Amber now knows about the group, that they are at the old Earthship. These two girls are now bound together for life. This girl whom I gave motherlove will now offer motherlove to my other child. I saved Alejandra from the trauma of the daytime desert, she now will save Amber from the trauma of a certain night. Because of this, they will never be able to turn away from the real sorrows of the world. They will use it to their advantage and to become more human.

  Now they are turning away from me, not registering my startle, and they are mumbling something about making a cake. A TessHoneyCake, Amber is saying with a giggle. And now Alejandra is humming the song her mother was singing. Then Libby walks in, carrying a heavy wooden bucket. “Hello, dearhearts,” she says to Amber and Alejandra. “It’s time to get busy, everyone. We’re finally going to spin the honey out. Ed’s bringing the frames in.”

  She puts down the bucket with a thud and turns in my direction, offers a small smile. In return, I offer a small wave of the hand. Such a small movement with such potential, and now each of us standing in a new and settled silence. She looks to me like a thirty-year-old small-town woman should look, her thick hair pulled back in a raggedy ponytail, an oversized white T-shirt and cheapbrand jeans. She looks like someone who has sailed with open eyes through the suffering this world offers.