Lightning Strikes

by Virginia Andrews

“What do you mean?”

  “I never told Mrs. Endfield where I was going. I don’t know if she expects me here later to help with the dinner. I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll have to go back inside and see if I can find out.”

  “Oh. That’s okay. I’ll wait,” he said.

  “I’ll be as quick as I can,” I told him and hurried into the house.

  I expected Boggs would pop out of a room or out from under some table as he usually did, but he wasn’t anywhere in sight. With Mrs. Chester out and Mary Margaret doing some shopping for her at the greengrocer’s, the house was quiet. I thought for a moment, wondering if I should just leave a note for my great-aunt. It didn’t really answer the question, however, so I started up the stairs to see if Great-aunt Leonora was in her suite.

  When I drew close to the bedroom door, I heard what sounded like someone humming a children’s song. There was even a laugh, a laugh that resembled the laughter of a small girl. I stood there a moment longer and then I knocked.

  “Mrs. Endfield? Mrs. Endfield, it’s Rain. May I speak with you a moment, please?” I asked through the door.

  The humming stopped. I waited and then I knocked softly again.

  “Mrs. Endfield?”

  The silence was confusing. I knew I had heard a voice on the other side of the door. I waited and then, I decided to knock once more, a little harder. When I did, the door opened a few inches.

  “Mrs. Endfield?”

  Again, I was greeted with silence. I leaned forward and peered into the room. My great-aunt was sitting in a rocking chair with her back to me. Her head was down, and she was holding something in her arms. I was about to call out her name, when I felt a large, strong hand grab my shoulder and spin me around.

  It was Boggs. Before he spoke, he reached past me for the doorknob and closed the door sharply.

  “How dare you go snooping around like this?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

  “I wasn’t snooping. I knocked and I called for Mrs. Endfield. The door swung open so I looked in for her, that’s all,” I protested. Surely by now my great-aunt had heard the commotion and would come to the door, I thought. I hoped she would, for Boggs was towering over me with eyes that shot fire at my face.

  “What do you want ’ere? I thought you were going out for the day,” he said.

  “First, if you must know, I wanted Mrs. Endfield to know I was going and second, I wanted to see if she wanted me back to help with dinner,” I explained.

  “You don’t ask ’er that. You ask me. Don’t you listen? You was told that already. I already told ’er you was goin’ out for the day,” he said. “And as for your services, if you were required to be ’ere, I’d a told you that, too. You don’t ’afta worry about that.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Then I’m going.”

  His eyes followed me closely as I walked around him and to the stairs. I didn’t look back, but I knew he was standing right there, watching me descend. My heart was thumping and a cold sweat had broken out over my brow and down the back of my neck. I practically ran out of the house.

  Randall, who was leaning against the garden wall, straightened up immediately. I hurried to him.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “No. Let’s just go,” I said. “Quickly.”

  He was nearly jogging to keep up with me. Finally, he reached out and took me by the elbow.

  “Hold on. You’re beating the hell out of this street and you’re not even going in the right direction.”

  “What? Oh? What is the right direction?” I asked, sounding frantic.

  He nodded in the opposite direction.

  “Did that guy yell at you or something? I hope I didn’t cause any trouble.”

  “No. Forget it,” I said. “It has nothing to do with you.”

  He shrugged.

  “Okay. We could continue and walk through the Gardens,” he said, “and then catch a taxi to Buckingham, unless you want to stop at Harrod’s first and see the world’s most famous department store.”

  “Let’s take it a step at a time,” I said. “We’ll walk through the Gardens first. I’d like to just breathe some fresh air.”

  “Okay. You’re right. We’ve got lots of time. We’re going to be in London quite a while.”

  “Maybe,” I said under my breath. “Maybe you will, but I won’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. I’m just babbling. Don’t pay any attention to me.”

  I looked back in the direction of the house. Why hadn’t my Great-aunt Leonora acknowledged me? She had to have heard all that noise. I had knocked loud enough to wake the infamous ghost of Sir Rogers’s mistress.

  And where had Boggs come from so quickly? What did he do all day, wait in the shadows?

  Why did he want to keep me from seeing and speaking to my great-aunt? More importantly, perhaps, what was she holding in her arms?

  At the bottom of my stomach, a small trickle of ice water began to run into my veins. There was something here, something even my grandmother didn’t know about, I thought, or she surely wouldn’t have sent me.

  5

  Outcasts in London

  As we walked through the park, Randall played the tour guide. He read and spoke in a thick British accent, pretending to be a stuffy English lord, or as Mrs. Chester would say, “a chinless wonder.”

  He pulled his head back so that he could talk down at me with a lot of nasality.

  “Kensington Gardens, adjacent to Hyde Park, was originally Kensington Palace’s front yard, yes? Kensington Palace was originally called Nottingham House. It passed into royal ownership in 1689 when it was acquired by William and Mary. The King’s asthma dictated a move from Whitehall Palace to the healthier air of Kensington, yes?

  “Go on, take deep breaths,” he said, taking big ones himself. “There, you see? One breath and all the soot is gone from your lungs,” he declared. “Go on,” he urged me.

  “I don’t have any soot in my lungs, thank you,” I said.

  He continued to read from his guidebook.

  “After William III’s death in 1702 the palace became the residence of Queen Anne. Christopher Wren designed the Orangery for her and a thirty-acre garden was laid out by Henry Wise.

  “The last monarch to live at Kensington Palace was George II, whose consort, Caroline of Ansbach, influenced the development of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Consort?”

  He stopped and thought. Then he smiled.

  “Do you realize if it wasn’t for his lover, this might not be here?” he asked. “Thank heaven for little girls, eh?” he sang now in a French accent.

  People on both sides of us stopped to look and listen, their faces filling with smiles. His voice could carry across the city, I thought. How quickly he took me out of my dark mood. We were both laughing by the time we reached the famous Round Pond where two little boys were sailing their toy boats. Randall suggested we stop and just sit on the grass and watch for a while. I sat, embracing my knees and gazing around at the beautiful flowers. Except for the laughter and shouts of the children, there was little noise. How far away my troubled world seemed now.

  Randall had a wistful smile on his face as he watched the little boys run about the pond. He reminded me of an old man dreaming he was young again.

  “What’s it like where you come from?” I asked.

  “Toronto? We live in a fashionable part of the city. I always attended private schools, just as my sister and brother do now. As I told you, Dad’s a successful stockbroker with clients as far away as Hong Kong.”

  “And your mother?”

  Mothers intrigued me far more than fathers at the moment, perhaps because my real one had turned out to be such a disappointment.

  “My mother is an artist,” he said playing with a blade of grass as if it was a paintbrush.

  “Really?”

  “Well, she wants to be. She has sold paintings and some small sculptures, but mostly to friends of the family. On
e of the galleries in Toronto featured her work a year ago.” He smiled. “I think Dad had something to do with that. If my mother knew or even suspected, she would have pulled her work out in a New York minute.”

  “New York minute?”

  “Don’t you know that expression? Dad’s always using it. It means faster than anywhere else, I suppose because New Yorkers are always in a rush.” He tilted his head. “Haven’t you ever been to New York and been banged around by people hurrying down the sidewalks?”

  “No.”

  “No? You’ve come to London, England, but you’ve never been to New York?” he asked astounded.

  “I didn’t always have these opportunities,” I said. “For me, going to New York was about as difficult as going to London.”

  “Huh? I don’t understand.”

  He waited as I carefully constructed my words. I knew what he was thinking. If I was attending such an expensive school in England, why was I so underprivileged in America?

  “I’m part of a program sponsored by wealthy people, a charity. You could say I won the lottery or something,” I added.

  “You mean you won a contest where the prize was going to school in London?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So it’s like a scholarship? Did you perform something? Sing something in order to win it?”

  “I performed,” I said, feeling bitterness like rot in an apple spread through me and my memories. “I’m still performing.”

  He looked even more confused.

  “Something’s being lost in the translation here,” he said shaking his head.

  I fixed my eyes on him. I could feel the heat in them myself, cooking up the memories I would have rather left on the shelf.

  “I come from a very poor neighborhood in Washington, D.C. My family lived in government-subsidized housing, in apartments called the projects.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “My father was a drunk and always lost his job or wasted his money. My mother worked in a supermarket.”

  He nodded, but I had a feeling that what I was describing was so far out of his experience, it was as if I was telling him the plot of a science fiction movie.

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” he asked.

  “I had a younger sister, Beni. She was killed, murdered by gang members.”

  “Really?” He sounded shocked.

  “I wouldn’t want to make any of this up, believe me,” I said. “I have an older brother who is in the army. He’s in Germany now.”

  Randall just stared at me for a moment as if a mask had dropped off my face and he was looking at the real me.

  “Do your parents still live there?” he finally asked.

  “My father’s in jail and my mother died recently,” I said. “Depressed enough?” I muttered and got up and started away.

  “Hey!” he called and caught up with me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put you in a bad mood.”

  “You didn’t. I was born in a bad mood,” I commented.

  “I would never know it by talking to you. No, I mean it,” he continued when I stopped to look at him skeptically. “When I first started to talk to you at the school, I just thought you were someone different,” he added.

  “Different? Yeah, Randall, I’m different,” I said laughing coldly. “That’s for sure. It didn’t take you long to spot that.”

  “No, I didn’t mean in a bad way. You’re. . . I don’t know . . . not like any girl I ever met.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Suddenly his white-bread world annoyed me. His whole life looked like a soft slide downhill and he had been born with a wonderful talent too. Who decided all this? Was there some judge who considered you when you were about to be born and with a wave of his hand, he sent you to this family or that, this world or that? What could I or Beni or Roy have done to be given this destiny as opposed to the one Randall had been given?

  “You were brought up with a silver spoon in your mouth. You just said so yourself,” I told him. “Private schools, rich parents, beautiful home. . .art galleries and theaters. Your family took you on expensive vacations. You were shocked to learn I hadn’t even been to New York City!”

  “No, I just. . .”

  “You know why I seem different? I’m as good as an alien to you. You wanted to talk to me because you thought I was different?

  “I’m different, all right. Boy, am I different. Yeah, I’m black and white, too, and. . .lost,” I moaned, hurrying away.

  I didn’t look back. I knew deep inside that it wasn’t fair to take out my frustrations on him and jump on every word he said, but I wasn’t in the mood to be fair. I dug my feet into the grass so hard, I could feel the earth move beneath my heels. I walked and walked, passing all sorts of tourists, couples holding hands, families, young men carrying backpacks, people from everywhere. A stream of foreign languages rushed by: Italian, French, Japanese, Russian. . .I really could be from outer space, I thought and finally, short of breath, flopped on a bench.

  I sat there staring across the park at the street full of traffic: double-decker buses, sightseeing buses, English taxi cabs, foreign cars mixed with American cars, people everywhere waiting for the green man to appear at the crossing light. It felt like a carnival atmosphere, like the whole world was on holiday.

  “Wow. I practically had to sprint to keep up with you,” Randall said coming up behind me. “May I sit beside you?” he asked.

  “It’s a public bench,” I replied.

  You’re so bad-tempered today, Rain, I heard a voice inside me say.

  “I’m sorry if I insulted you in some way,” Randall began. “Believe me, I didn’t mean to.”

  “I’m just tired of thinking about myself as different,” I said followed by a deep sigh. “For a while I’d like to be the same, boring and common.”

  “Different doesn’t have to mean something bad. It could be good. Lots of people want to be different,” he said softly, gingerly, like someone walking on thin ice.

  “My mother’s always talking about being different. She hates being thought of as just another middle-class wife. I know because she’s often saying that. I think that’s why she wants to be an artist so much. While the wives of my father’s friends are attending charity luncheons, afternoon cocktail parties and such, she’s in her studio getting paint on her face.”

  “On her face?”

  “She always comes out looking messy. My dad accuses her of tasting the paint before she uses it,” he said.

  I looked away to smile with tears still in my eyes. How wonderful it must be to have parents who love and cherish each other and create a warm, happy world for their children, I thought.

  “You were right,” he admitted gazing down, “I don’t know too many black kids. But,” he added, turning to me, “I really don’t know that many white ones either. I don’t have all that many friends back home. I guess it’s because I’ve been attending these special schools, working with voice coaches, spending all my spare time on developing my voice because my parents want me to be a star.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not all the time,” he said. He leaned back, the soft strands of his hair falling over his forehead. His eyes filled with a warm glow as he gazed into his own thoughts. “When we were watching those little boys back at Round Pond, I was thinking about all the fun I missed out on. I was given piano lessons, not many toys. My parents were afraid to let me participate in sports as if building my wind for something other than singing might damage my voice.

  “They let me learn to skate, but being part of the hockey team was impossible because of the conflicts with my music practice.

  “You know what, Rain,” he said suddenly as if the realization had really just occurred, “I’m different, too. I was always different in the eyes of my fellow students. I guess I was freaky to most of them.”

  “I doubt that,” I said. I really meant not to the girls, not someone with his good looks.

&
nbsp; “Yeah, well, that’s the way I felt now that I think about it.”

  “Are you going to sit there and tell me you didn’t have a girlfriend or girlfriends?”

  He laughed.

  “I had a girlfriend named Nicolette Sabon. We were taking singing lessons from the same teacher, Mr. Wegman. He used to tap a ruler on the top of my head to keep me in rhythm. He had Nicolette and me singing duets, performing at the school’s productions and going around the city singing for ladies’ organizations and clubs. We were together a lot because of that, posed for pictures together, were seen everywhere together, and one day Nicolette told me I was her boyfriend and she was my girlfriend. I remember she made it sound as if I had no choice. Like it was ordained by a higher power.”

  “How old were you?” I asked.

  “Twelve. She was eleven.”

  “Twelve? Eleven? That was your only love affair?”

  He shrugged.

  “I had a crush on a girl when I was fifteen, but I didn’t smoke or drink beer and she thought I was some sort of dud, I guess, because all I asked her to do with me was listen to music or go to a show. She said my good looks were wasted on me. She really made me feel different, speaking of feeling different. It got around the school that I was a huge bore, and I felt like crawling into a hole.”

  “She was an idiot,” I said, “and your good looks are not wasted on you. People will love to look at you as well as listen to you. Your good looks fit the quality of your voice, Randall. Don’t ever regret that,” I ordered.

  His eyes widened.

  “I can’t tell if you like me or hate me,” he said.

  I had to smile.

  “I don’t hate you. Of course, I don’t hate you. Maybe I hate myself,” I said growing serious again. “No, there’s no maybes about it. I do.”

  “You shouldn’t. I know I don’t have the right to give advice to you. I know I can’t even begin to understand the world you come from or what you’ve gone through before getting here, but I’ve seen many so-called talented girls and I’m telling you, you’re the cream of the crop.”

  “Oh, is that right?”

  “Yes, it is,” he insisted.