Lightning Strikes

by Virginia Andrews

  “Is he still trying to become president of the United States?” I asked out of the side of my mouth.

  “He’s ambitious and I wouldn’t put it past him to run for high office soon,” she admitted.

  I stopped and turned to her.

  “All right, Mother,” I said. “What do you want from me? Let’s just get it out and over with, okay?”

  “Well, we know that my mother . . .” She shook her head, smiling, “my mother created a situation that would make it all very difficult for us. She has apparently left you title to fifty-one percent of the house and property, the remaining forty-nine percent divided between Victoria and me. She left you fifty percent of the business, and she has left you what amounts to nearly two million dollars in investments that pay good dividends.”

  My breath caught in my throat. It would have taken Mama and anyone in her family twenty lifetimes to come close to my fortune, a fortune I had inherited almost overnight.

  “Of course,” my mother continued, “it’s shocking. Victoria wants us to challenge the will and take it through court to get a judge to invalidate it. She claims my mother was not in her right mind at the time. Grant says there could be a serious challenge to the will and while that was going on, of course, your life would be in limbo, Rain.

  “So what Grant wants to propose is we compromise. We’ll set aside a quarter of a million dollars for you in an account and you could then be your own person and do whatever you wanted with your life. Victoria would be satisfied. Well, not really, but we could shut her up, and everyone could go on with their life. What do you think?”

  My eyes were so full of tears, I could barely see her. Wasn’t there even a tiny speck of a motherly instinct in her for me? Was Grandmother Hudson’s death and the aftermath only an opportunity to rid herself of me forever?

  I should take this ugly deal, I thought, and turn my back on this miserable family. I should just return to England immediately and make my own life there, maybe close to my real father, who at least wasn’t looking for every opportunity possible to deny my existence.

  “Rain?”

  I turned and looked out over the lake. What would Grandmother Hudson say to all this? What would she expect me to do?

  I recalled the day I had left her. Every moment, every second of that good-bye, lingered in my mind vividly. I was so concerned then that it would be the last time we would be together and I had been right. She had looked into my face with such hope and said, “I was afraid there was nobody in my family with a sense of propriety and the grit to do the right things. Don’t disappoint me.”

  “Grandmother Hudson had a reason for what she did,” I began and turned slowly to face my mother. “I made her certain promises, promises she will expect me to keep, even now, maybe even more now than ever. I wouldn’t change a comma in her will,” I said defiantly.

  My mother looked shocked. Obviously she had been so confident she would convince me to do what Grant had wanted.

  “But Rain, look at what will happen. Victoria won’t give up easily and. . .”

  “Somehow,” I said smiling, “I think your husband will be able to convince her.”

  She just stared. I smiled and she shook her head.

  “You really are like her,” she said angrily.

  “That, Mother, was the best compliment you could ever have given me.”

  She nodded, turned and started back toward the house.

  I took a deep breath.

  I was afraid.

  My whole body trembled. I had no idea what I was going to do or how I would defend myself, but I was on Grandmother Hudson’s land and I was in her house and her words still echoed inside me.

  This wouldn’t be easy, I thought as I started back, too.

  “So?” I could hear Grandmother Hudson reply. “When has anything ever been easy for you, Rain?”

  I smiled, closed my eyes and said, “I won’t disappoint you, Grandmother.”

  Epilogue

  No one bothered much with me before or during the funeral and its aftermath. Brody was the only one who really spoke to me, asking me questions about England and telling me about his school year and his achievements in sports. He was still a good prospect for a football scholarship. Alison avoided me constantly, which was just fine with me. She looked annoyed about having to attend her own grandmother’s funeral. Most of the time, she stayed in her room, sulking.

  It was really Jake who kept me informed about the time and place for everything. I rode to the funeral in the Rolls with my great-uncle and my great-aunt. Everyone else was in a hired limousine. Great-uncle Richard really didn’t know all the details of the will yet and was simply anxious to get back to his precious England and his own work. Great-aunt Leonora played the deeply saddened sister, but she would brighten like a spotlight whenever some old friend approached her and she had an opportunity to describe and brag about her wonderful life in England. Very quickly, it all turned into more of a social event and I retreated to my own room to wait for the eventual outcome.

  Grant paid me one final visit before the reading of the will. He came to my room, the maid’s room, the day before to make one more attempt at what he called “a reasonable solution.”

  For any other man, I thought, this would be a very embarrassing and difficult meeting. After all, he was face to face with his wife’s illegitimate daughter.

  However, he handled it as if he were just the opposing party’s attorney, keeping it formal, correct.

  “I thought if we could have one sensible conversation, we could avoid anything unpleasant for all concerned,” he began.

  “It’s too late,” I said uncharitably. “I have had nothing but unpleasantness here.”

  “Which is my point. Why continue that? I could,” he continued, “convince Victoria to agree to be more generous with the compromise. How does half a million dollars sound?”

  “Disgusting,” I said. I turned on him. “Whatever makes you think my relationship with my grandmother could have some price tag put on it? What right do you have to assume things about me? What do you know about my dreams, my sense of responsibility and love toward this woman who has given me so much? I’m not some sort of blemish you heave makeup over and forget.”

  He stared at me. Despite his purpose, he looked like he appreciated me.

  “I’m just trying to make things right.”

  “For whom?”

  “Everyone,” he insisted.

  “Grandmother Hudson,” I replied, “has already done that.”

  He nodded, saw he could get no further, shrugged and left me.

  Grandmother Hudson’s attorney, Roger Sanger, a man in his late fifties, called me to personally tell me he would be conducting the reading of the will the next day. I told him about Victoria’s objections and how she might be taking it all to court.

  “I know all about it,” he said. “I spent a lot of time with Mrs. Hudson, and Victoria knows I was a witness to the will. There was nothing wrong with Mrs. Hudson’s mind and she knew exactly what she wanted to do. Victoria has spoken to me a number of times about this. I think she finally understands.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. I knew Victoria was not the sort of person you could read and then predict what she would do. To me, after what she had tried to do with the letter she had sent to my great-uncle, she was a viper.

  Brody and Alison weren’t at the lawyer’s office, as my mother had said. She and Grant had sent them home. It was a very dry and official meeting. Victoria grimaced with pain every time my name was mentioned.

  When it ended, my great-uncle and great-aunt were the most shocked. They had yet to be told all the details. Perhaps Grant still had hoped to clear it up beforehand. Except for their astonishment, very little was said and it felt like another funeral. Mr. Sanger spent time afterward with me, discussing some of the legal paperwork.

  Great-uncle Richard and Great-aunt Leonora had booked themselves on a flight back to London immediately afterward. They said g
ood-bye to everyone and Jake took them to the airport. By this time Great-aunt Lenora seemed quite dazed and confused by all the events and every time she looked at me, her eyes widened. Before they left, she did come to me to say, “You’re almost richer than we are.”

  “I always was,” I told her. She had no idea what I meant. Great-uncle Richard didn’t even try to say goodbye to me.

  My mother came to see me before she and Grant started back home.

  “I really don’t know how all this will come out, Rain,” she said. “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to stay here for a while,” I said. “I will probably return to England for the next semester and continue pursuing my dramatics career.”

  “You want to stay in this big house by yourself?”

  “It was home to you once, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding. “Though it seems like that was another life now. I’ll call you,” she promised. She attempted to hug and kiss me. I stood like stone and she turned and left.

  I went out front and watched Jake drive them off. The sky had become quite overcast. Low clouds rolled in from the east and the wind grew stronger and stronger. I could see how it made the water ripple on the lake. I wasn’t chilled, however. It all smelled fresh and made me feel good. I was even looking forward to the downpour that the clouds promised. I expected it would wash away the sadness and the sorrow and make tomorrow look even brighter.

  I was thinking I would return to the cemetery myself when the weather cleared and say my own final good-bye to Grandmother Hudson.

  Just then a door slammed on the side of the house and Victoria came around the corner, her arms full of folders. She stopped when she saw me.

  “These are mine,” she said. “They have to do with my business.”

  “Don’t you mean our business?” I asked.

  She glared at me and stepped closer.

  “What do you think you will get out of all this defiance?” she demanded.

  I looked away and smiled.

  “My name,” I said, turning back to her. “Nothing more and nothing less.”

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  She walked away.

  The two crows I had often seen before soared over the lake and toward the house, veering to the right, toward the sea.

  They flew as if they believed the future always held promise for them, I thought.

  I hoped and prayed I was right in thinking it did for me, too.

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  Robin

  “Wake up, Robin!” I heard my mother say. I felt myself being rocked hard.

  At first I thought the rocking was in my dream, a dream so deep I had to swim up to consciousness like a diver from the ocean floor. Each time my mother shook my shoulder, I drew closer and closer to the surface, moaning.

  “Quiet!” she ordered. “You’ll wake Grandpa and Grandma and I’ll have my hands full of spilt milk. Darn it, Robin. I told you what time we were headin’ outta here. You haven’t even finished packin’,” she said.

  My suitcase was open on the floor, some of my clothes still beside it. Mother darling had insisted I not begin until after I supposedly went to bed last night. My mother said I couldn’t bring but one suitcase of my things, and it was hard to decide what to take and not to take. She needed everything of hers because she was going to be a country singing star and had to have her outfits and all her boots and every hat as well as half a suitcase of homemade audiotapes she thought would win the admiration of an important record producer in Nashville.

  I sat up and pressed my palms over my cheeks, patting them like Grandpa always did when he put on aftershave lotion. The skin on my face was still asleep and felt numb. My mother stood back and looked at me with her small nose scrunched, which was something she always did when she was very annoyed. She also twisted her full lips into her cheek. She had the smallest mouth for someone who could sing as loudly as she could, but most women envied her lips. I know that some of her friends went for collagen shots to get theirs like hers.

  Everyone said we looked like sisters because I had the same petite features, the same rust-colored hair, and the same soft blue eyes. Nothing she heard pleased her more. The last thing she wanted to be known as was my mother, or anyone’s mother for that matter. She was thirty-four years old this week, and she was convinced she had absolutely her last chance to become a singing star. She said she had to pass me off as her younger sister or she wouldn’t be taken seriously. I was sixteen last month, and she wanted everyone, especially people in show business, to believe she was just in her mid-twenties.

  Although I was closer to one of her idols, Dolly Patton, than she was when it came to breasts, we did have similar figures, both being a shade more than five feet five. She always looked taller because she hardly ever wore anything but boots. She wore hip-hugging tight jeans most of the time, and when she went out to sing at what she called another honky-tonk, she usually tied the bottom of her blouse so there was a little midriff showing. Grandpa would swell up with anger, his face nearly breaking out in hives, or just blow out his lips and explode with Biblical references.

  “We taught you the ways of the righteous, brought you up to be a churchgoing girl, and you still dress like a street tramp. Even after . . . after . . . your Fall,” he told her and swung his eyes my way.

  That’s what I was in his way of thinking: The Fall, the result of “the grand sin of fornication.” Mother darling had been sexually active at the age of fifteen and had me when she was only sixteen. Grandpa, despite despising the situation as much as he did, would not permit even talk of an abortion.

  “You abide by your actions and pay for your sins. It’s the only path toward redemption,” he preached then, according to Mother darling, and preached now.

  I remember the first time I was arrested for shoplifting. The policewoman knew my grandparents and asked me how I could behave so badly coming from a solid, religious, and loving home. Wasn’t I just a self-centered ingrate?

  I fixed my eyes on her and said, “My mother didn’t want me. My grandparents forced me down her throat, and she never stops throwing that back at them. How would you like living in such a solid, religious, and loving home?”

  She blinked as if she had soot in her eyes and then grunted and went off mumbling about teenagers. I was just barely one. It was two days after my thirteenth birthday and the first time I was arrested. I had shoplifted a number of times before, but I was never caught. It amazed me how really easy it was. Half the time, if not more, those machines that are supposed to ring, don’t; and the employees, especially of the department stores, don’t seem to care enough to watch for it. I practically waved whatever it was I was taking in front of their faces. Many times I threw away whatever I took almost immediately afterward. I couldn’t chance bringing it home.

  Grandpa placed all the blame on Mother darling, telling her she was setting a very bad example for me by dressing the way she dressed and singing in places “the devil himself won’t enter.” He would rant at her, waving his thick right forefinger in the air like an evangelist in one of those prayer meetings in large tents. He made me attend them with him when I was younger, claiming he had to work extra hard on me since I was spawned from sin. Anyway, he would bellow at Mother darling so loudly, the walls of the old farmhouse shook.

  Grandma would try to calm him down, but he would sputter and stammer like one of his old tractors, usually concluding with “Thank goodness she took on your mother’s maiden name, Kay Jackson, when she goes singing in thos
e bars. I can pretend I don’t know who she is.”

  “You don’t have to pretend. You don’t know who I am, Daddy,” my mother would fire back at him. “Never did, never will. I’m writin’ a song about it.”

  “Lord, save us,” Grandpa would finally say and retreat. He was close to sixty-five, but looked more like fifty, with a full head of light brown hair with just a touch of gray here and there, and thick, powerful-looking shoulders and arms. He could easily lift a fully grown Dorset Horn sheep and carry it a mile. Despite his strength and his rage, I never saw him lift his hand to strike my mother or me. I think he was afraid of his own strength.

  My grandparents owned a sheep farm about ten miles east of Columbus, just outside the village of Granville. The farm was no longer active, although Grandpa kept a dozen Olde English Babydoll sheep that he raised and sold.

  Before she went anywhere, Mother darling would practically bathe herself in cologne, claiming the stench of sheep and pigs permeated the house. “It sinks into your very soul,” she claimed, which was another thing that set Grandpa on fire, the farm being his way of life and his living. Mother darling had the ability to ignite him like a stick of dynamite. Sometimes, I thought she was doing it on purpose, just to see how far he would go. The most I saw him do was slam his fist down on the kitchen table and make the dishes jump so high, one fell off and shattered.

  “That,” he said, pointing to it and then to her, “gets added to your rent.”

  Ever since Mother darling quit high school and worked in the supermarket and then began to sing nights with one pair of musicians or another, Grandpa insisted she pay rent for her and for me. It wasn’t much, but it took most of her supermarket salary, which was another justification she used for her singing, not that she needed any. She was convinced she could be a big star.

  I knew she was saving up for something big. Suddenly, she was willing to work overtime at the supermarket and she took any singing gig she and her partners at the time could get, from private parties to singing for an hour or so in the malls in Columbus.