The Night the Lights Went Out

by Karen White

  “Good-bye, Curtis,” I said again, this time closing the front door in his face.

  His visit had unsettled me, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I made supper and fed Mama, then returned to the kitchen table, where I ate with Jimmy. His field glasses hung around his neck as always, and he ate in a real hurry, barely taking time to chew his food.

  “Is there a fire somewhere that I don’t know about?” I asked.

  He replied around a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “Nope. Just spotted a whippoorwill nest in the woods I want to study tonight. I found the perfect tree and Lamar’s gonna help me get into position. I expect to spend the night out there, so I’ll bring a pillow.” He swallowed, then coughed. He’d never completely gotten over the chest cold he’d had when we’d met Tom that past spring. Dr. Mackenzie said it had weakened his heart and lungs in a bad way and that he needed to take it easy. Not like anything like that would ever slow Jimmy down. For a boy in a wheelchair, he was probably more active than the average person. His arms were so strong I’d once watched him climb a tree with his legs dangling beneath him.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do stuff like that, Jimmy. You could really get hurt. And it’s going to get cold tonight—and you know what that does to your chest.”

  “Lamar’ll be with me and I’ll wear a sweater and bring a thick blanket, all right? So you can quit your worrying.”

  I slid my napkin across the table toward him. “Clean your glasses. I swear I don’t know how you see anything.”

  He smiled as he took the napkin, his face so sweet and precious to me. I figured that even if I never had any children, just having Jimmy in my life would always be enough.

  Despite his assurances, I did worry. I lay in bed, sure I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but the exhaustion of the day must have overtaken me, because when the scream awoke me it was full dark.

  I sat up, shivering in the cold, wondering if I had imagined it. But then I heard it again, muffled this time, and then something crashed and shattered as it hit the floor.

  “Mama?” I shouted as I slid from the bed and ran downstairs to her bedroom. Her door was shut but not latched, and when I pushed it open I could see my mother’s white nightgown on the floor. It took my eyes a moment to register in the dark and see the shadows on top of the bed.

  “Bitch,” a voice said, and I recognized it. Curtis. “You ain’t supposed to be able to talk.” And then the unmistakable sound of a slap against skin, and my mother whimpering.

  My fingers fumbled on the wall for the light switch, but he was faster, the sound of broken glass crunching under his feet before he grabbed my wrist, squeezing until my fingertips tingled. “Let go of me,” I shouted, desperate to pull away, and even more desperate to get him away from my mama.

  His other hand threaded through my hair, and he pressed wet lips against mine. “I’d prefer something younger and sweeter, anyway.”

  Without even having to think about it, I raised my knee and slammed it into his crotch. He let go immediately, but I didn’t run. I needed to make sure that he chased me, that he left Mama alone.

  I listened to his breathing, reminding me of a bear my daddy had once caught in a trap. And that scared me, finally. Because I remembered how it had taken three shots to finally kill that bear.

  “Bitch!” he screamed at me, and I was glad, because that meant he’d recovered his breath. I turned and ran toward the back door in the kitchen, glancing over my shoulder to make sure he was chasing me. With my bare feet slipping on cold, damp grass, I ran as fast as I could toward the dark woods.

  The full moon guided me until I was deep inside, the thick canopy of trees hiding the light, surprising me with random bursts of yellow on the forest floor as my feet pounded, the skin tearing on rocks and sticks and me not feeling any of it. I could hear Curtis, his feet crunching dead leaves, his breath panting behind me. I didn’t turn around, stretching my arms out to protect me. I was half-aware of my nightgown glowing like a beacon, making it easy for him to follow me. But there was nothing I could do about it. I had lost all sense of where I was, simply searching for a place to hide where he couldn’t see my nightgown. My hand struck the bark of a tree, the snap of bone so loud I cried out. I fought to catch my breath, seeing red spots against the inside of my eyelids, before turning in what I hoped was a new direction.

  And ran right into Curtis Brown.

  He was like that wounded bear in his anger, ripping at my nightgown and howling with rage and pain and victory. He squeezed my broken hand and I dropped to my knees, and that made it easy for the rest of what happened. I don’t remember much. Just his hands on my breasts and then my thighs, the smell of the pine straw beneath my head, the pain that made me feel like I was being ripped in two. He wanted me to cry: I could feel it each time he struck me with his fist and each time he invaded me. So I bit my lip until I tasted blood, telling myself I would rather die than give him the satisfaction.

  And somewhere through the river of pain, something big and heavy rustled through the woods toward us, the pounding on the ground vibrating in my ear. I kept my eyes shut tight and clung to that pulsing sound, focusing on it so that I could ignore everything else, and prayed it was a bear seeking vengeance.

  A scream like I’d never heard erupted from the shadows, and I forced open my eyes as something huge charged toward us, making a sound that was part wounded animal and part devil. I’d never believed in the devil until that moment, and I didn’t care whose soul he was there to steal as long as it meant all this would be over.

  “Get off of her!”

  It was Jimmy, riding on the back of Lamar, who’d grown as big as Rufus and could carry Jimmy like he weighed no more than a leaf. Jimmy threw something at Curtis and it struck the side of his head with a sickening thunk, knocking him off me. My broken hand forgotten, I crawled backward, pulling what was left of my nightgown over my legs and across my chest.

  Curtis lay still, his eyes closed, but his breath wheezed in and out so I knew he wasn’t dead. Lamar had stopped running, and with another scream, Jimmy launched himself on top of Curtis and picked up a large rock—the one that he’d thrown the first time—and held it over Curtis’s head. Lamar grabbed Jimmy’s hand and pulled him back.

  “Don’t do it, Jimmy. Don’t do it. That be murder on your head, and he ain’t worth it.”

  Jimmy waited a long moment before letting the rock fall. He rolled off Curtis, his breath thick with liquid. He began to cough, the kind that wore him out and bent him over. When he’d finished, he began crawling toward me, his binoculars dragging through the dead leaves and pine straw. “We came as fast as we could, but it was so dark . . .” He started to cough again.

  “I know. It’s all right. He didn’t hurt me. Just my hand—I think it’s broke.” I grimaced with the pain, hoping neither one of them noticed. “I need to get back for Mama—I need to make sure she’s all right.”

  Lamar crouched next to me, and I could smell his sweat mixed with the stink of my own fear. “Can you walk? ’Cause if you can, I’ll carry Jimmy back to the house.”

  We all looked at Curtis, who was moaning quietly. “Leave him,” I said.

  There was something in my voice, something stronger and older that hadn’t been there before. They must have noticed it, too, because they didn’t argue. We left him there, and when Lamar went back the next day to check, he was gone.

  We told my daddy that I’d gotten hurt falling from a tree where I’d been watching birds with Jimmy. He was too preoccupied with the farm and Mama’s constant crying to pay any heed to how that didn’t make sense. But we’d figured that Daddy would have killed Curtis if he’d known the truth, and like Lamar had said, it would have been murder on Daddy’s head. And we all knew that Curtis Brown wasn’t worth it.

  I put Jimmy to bed and laid camphor compresses on his chest, but nothing worked. Even Dr. Mackenzie said there was nothi
ng to do for him, that his heart was too tired to keep going. I sat by his bed and read to him from all his bird books, and I knew that made him happy because he smiled a lot. But it didn’t make him better. I knew it was near the end when he asked me to take those binoculars off him and put them around my own neck.

  “Keep them safe,” he said. He began to cough, and I waited until he could speak again. “You don’t really need them, Sugar. You see pretty good already. Except sometimes, when it’s real dark”—he stopped to clear his throat, his voice thick—“remember that everything’s the same. You just can’t see it. You can figure out which way to go, or wait until somebody turns the light back on.”

  He started coughing again, and there was so much blood on his pajama shirt that I sent Lamar for Dr. Mackenzie. But by the time they got back, Jimmy was gone. I was still holding his hand, and all I could do was look at him and his dirty glasses and want to yell at him for never cleaning them.

  Tom helped me with my grieving, but he couldn’t put back what had been stolen from me that night. But he tried, and he was so gentle and caring, and I knew that if I still had a heart, it would love him. So when Tom asked me again to marry him, I said yes.

  Twenty

  THE PLAYING FIELDS BLOG

  Observations of Suburban Life from Sweet Apple, Georgia

  Written by: Your Neighbor

  Installment #7: Preparing for the End of the World: Snow

  Did you all know that this month is National Preparedness Month? There seems to be a month for everything now: National Physical Fitness and Sports Month, Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month, National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month, National Safety Month. I could go on and on until my calendar was so filled with reminders that there would be no room to put doctors’ appointments or friends’ birthdays—the two things that are pretty much the cure-all for most of what ails us.

  Shouldn’t we always be aware of society’s issues so that we can look for solutions? Or maybe we do need to be reminded because most of us are getting our news from Facebook these days instead of a legitimate newspaper written by real journalists.

  I’m not saying the attempt to bring people’s attention to these worthwhile issues isn’t important. I’m just thinking that perhaps the overabundance of them might make people pay less attention—and our attention spans are pretty short already. Or that perhaps the sheer quantity of issues might lessen their importance. Like that high school in a neighboring county that I shall not name that appointed twelve valedictorians because they didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by selecting just one. What’s one standout when there are eleven “good enoughs”?

  Which brings me to my next (loosely related) topic. A group of women—presumably mothers since it was right after school drop-off—sitting next to me in the local coffee shop last week were talking about millennials and how the world will certainly end when they’re old enough to take over and run things. One woman joked that the easiest way to confuse a millennial was to show them a first-place trophy.

  I wanted to turn around and ask them if they’d ever rushed back to their child’s school to bring PE shoes or a forgotten homework assignment. Or if they’d ever stepped in to finish a science project because their child had left it until the last minute and was worried about getting a lower grade because it was late. Because a sense of entitlement and a lack of responsibility dont’t just happen by accident. They are taught. Just something to think about.

  Back to National Preparedness Month. Did you know that FEMA has an app for this? There really is an app for everything. They pretty much have it covered, so I don’t need to elaborate. But I do have a request to my fellow Sweet Appletonians: Be prepared for snow. No, we probably won’t have another storm like we had a couple of winters ago during Snowmageddon, when people were stranded on I-285 overnight and we became the laughingstock of the country.

  Do yourselves a favor and head to Costco now and buy lots of kitty litter and extra blankets to throw in your car. Maybe even a snow shovel or two if you can find them. It makes no sense for the city of Atlanta and its environs to buy more snow-removal equipment for an event that rarely happens more than once a decade, so don’t look to the government to help you out here. Go ahead and have a good supply of bread in your freezer and bottled water in your garage so you can beat the rush to Kroger when the first flurry signals the end is near.

  My hat is off to our northern transplants, who actually know how to drive in snow. It’s the locals who seem to muck it up by doing things like stopping on the upside of a hill or braking too hard. I would suggest heading to Colorado in January and taking a driving class, or make a promise not to get behind the wheel of your SUV if there is so much as a snowflake in the sky. Hopefully the mayors of Atlanta and Sweet Apple have learned their lesson from the last snowstorm and know not to close all businesses and schools at the same time, thus orchestrating the biggest hot mess any of us have ever seen on the roadways. So do your duty and be prepared. And for heaven’s sake, if you see what we Southerners refer to as “the devil’s dandruff” falling from the sky, stay home.

  October is also Breast Cancer Awareness Month (don’t forget to schedule your mammogram and do your self-exam), in addition to being the month of the fall gala at several of our local schools. Time for moms to remember their prom days and wear pretty dresses and high heels, and for their husbands to be forced into tuxedos.

  Overheard in the same coffee shop were several planning meetings for various school galas. One event is being held in the school gym, one in a tent on the school’s football field, and one on the lawn of a grand Lake Lanier estate, fully catered (no home-brought chafing dishes for this school fund-raiser!) and under a rental tent that was actually used at a wedding for one of the “stars” (quotation marks intentional) of Real Housewives of Atlanta. I choked on my coffee when I heard the rental fee.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if it might be more efficient for the attendees to simply donate the money to the school instead of spending the money up front in the hope that people would donate it back. Am I missing something? Of course, that’s no fun, and I do appreciate dressing up and having a good time as much as the rest of you. But I also don’t mind making a batch of shrimp and grits to bring to an event to keep down costs.

  All this planning, and meetings, and discussions—it all brings me to today’s Southern saying: “It’s fixin’ to come up a bad cloud.” Sometimes it’s easy to see when a storm is brewing. The clouds lie low and angry, the heavens rumble, and flashes of lightning streak across the sky. You don’t need to be a weatherman—or weatherperson—to know a storm is brewing.

  It’s the subtle signs that most of us miss. A drop in air pressure. A breeze that springs out of nowhere. A friend who starts acting differently. Unreturned phone calls. An invitation that never arrives. There are all kinds of storms in life you need to watch out for. The next time you suspect something is unsettled in the atmosphere, either high above or right around you, just say, “It’s fixin’ to come up a bad cloud.” And then take cover.

  • • •

  MERILEE

  “Go, Cavaliers!”

  Bailey Blackford did an effortless split in front of the line of cheerleaders, holding her pom-poms up in a V. Merilee adjusted herself again on the hard metal bleachers at the football field, watching the end of the girls’ practice with other mothers. Several clutched pumpkin spice lattes, which had recently appeared on the menu at Starbucks, while others had giant-sized tumblers of iced water. Of course, it could have been vodka and Merilee wouldn’t have judged. She could use a stiff drink herself.

  She restrained herself from checking her watch. Lily’s tennis team practice was directly after this, and Merilee had to somehow manage to drive Lily across town in rush-hour traffic, pick up dinner at whatever drive-through they passed, and then be back at the rec center to pick up Colin from flag foo
tball practice. All in half an hour.

  She slid an envious glance over at Claire, Heather’s assistant, sitting nearby and looking calm and relaxed because all she had to do was take Bailey to tennis. The thought had occurred to Merilee to ask Heather if it might be possible for Lily to ride with them, but then she’d have to worry about Lily not eating (she knew Bailey would have a nutritious meal packed by Patricia waiting for her in a cooler), thereby letting Heather know that she actually didn’t have it all together despite what Heather kept telling her. If she did, she would have a nicely prepared dinner for her daughter, probably tied with neat blue and orange ribbons to show her team support. And a note of encouragement tucked inside. Because that’s what Heather would have done. Or had one of her minions do for her.

  But Heather hadn’t had a horrendous day at the office and been stuck in a traffic jam that ate up forty-five valuable minutes on her way to watch Lily’s practice. Lily had sent her a disappointed glance as Merilee attempted to find a spot on the bleachers that wasn’t already taken by the other mothers watching their daughters. She’d found a place separated from the other mothers by a turn of the bleachers and sat down next to Lindi Matthews. Lindi wore a suit and heels, leading Merilee to believe that she’d also come straight from work and arrived long after the other mothers had already hunkered down in the prized front-and-center seats.

  “Go, Jenna!” shouted Lindi as her daughter did back handsprings down the field.

  “Wow,” Merilee said. “You didn’t tell me she was such a gymnast.”

  Lindi smiled proudly. “She’s been working on those handsprings all summer. She didn’t tell me, but I think she really wanted to be on the squad and this was her way in.” She leaned over conspiratorially and whispered, “She’s not the most coordinated in the clapping routines and such, but she can do flips and handsprings with the best of them.” Sitting up, she added, “And because she’s so small, she’s perfect for the tops of the pyramids.”