Live Wire (Blue-Eyed Bomb #1)

by Amber Lynn Natusch

  I swallowed hard against my sadness. Suddenly I didn’t want to hear the reason for his earlier anger anymore.

  “Gabe—”

  “They found his remains and those of my uncles just on the other side of the creek—at least that’s what the sheriff told me after he got me calm enough to listen. Not far from where I found Mason.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, afraid to speak any louder and have my voice betray my emotions.

  “Sheriff told me my mother was lucky to be alive. Said her clothes were nearly charred to ash when they found her.”

  “Oh my God. She was there...” Not a question—a statement of fact. He nodded in affirmation. “She saw the whole thing.”

  Again, a nod.

  “She’s never spoken since the explosion. Not to me. Not to the cops. Not to anyone. Her soul died the second my father did. And seeing Mason lying there in that spot…”

  I couldn’t bear to see the pain in his eyes any longer. I launched across the bucket seat of the truck and threw my arms around his neck, clinging to him tightly. Words may have failed me, but my humanity had not.

  His hands gripped the back of my shirt tightly, and he pressed me closer to him, burying his head in my neck. We stayed there for longer than expected, neither of us saying a word. I realized just how difficult a life Gabe had. Not only did he have the farm and his mother resting on his shoulders, but he had all the pain and regret of the past piled on as well, the sum of the load nearly crushing him. It was a wonder it hadn’t already.

  He was stronger than I could have imagined a man being.

  I pulled away from him, placing my hands gently on his face. Staring into his eyes, I tried to think of what to say—anything that might help make him feel better. But I came up short.

  Luckily for me, it didn’t matter. Something else grabbed his attention.

  “Mom!” he shouted, throwing the truck door open with a shove and jumping out of the vehicle. He ran up the front steps to where his mother stood, looking off into the distance where the fading grey clouds blended into the horizon. “Mom! What are you doing out here?” I’m sure he wasn’t expecting a response, but he was so startled—even more so than the piano incident—that it was human nature to pose the question.

  I followed his lead and got out of the truck, then made my way to the front steps. His mother, unlike in the crawl space, looked as despondent as ever. She said nothing. Didn’t move. She just stood there and stared out over the fields of unharvested corn.

  The sight of her was completely unnerving.

  “We need to go back in, Mom,” Gabe said, wrapping his large arm around her tiny frame. As he lifted her up to carry her back into the house, he looked over his shoulder and shot me a curious glance. Guilt rose within me. Did he know something had happened between her and me in the crawl space? Could he sense it somehow? Once again there was something in his eyes, and I didn’t like the look of it at all.

  While he got his mother settled, I pulled some leftovers from the fridge and started to reheat them. Just as I was about to do my awkward balancing act to reach the shelf with the plates on it, Gabe walked in and plucked them out of the cabinet for me, placing them down on the counter next to the stove.

  “Thanks,” I said, messing with the knobs on the range.

  An awkward silence followed.

  “What I said in the truck,” he began, hesitating for a second. “I’ve never told anyone about that. I don’t really know why I told you, to be honest.”

  “Maybe you think I’ll forget,” I said, forcing a laugh.

  “Not sure that’s how amnesia works. You might be getting that confused with dementia.”

  “Potato, Po-tah-to,” I volleyed back at him.

  He gently took my arm and turned me to face him. The intensity in his eyes was penetrating, and I stared back at them without reservation.

  “I feel like I can trust you for some reason,” he said, his voice so earnest it nearly hurt to hear him speak those words. “Is that weird?”

  “I don’t know, but if it is, then I’m weird too because I feel the same. Hell, I’ve basically put my life in your hands until I remember who I am,” I replied, trying to lighten the mood. Before he could reply, the smell of burning food filled the air, and I whipped around to find the cheese from the lasagna burning in the pan. I managed to flip it over and pluck off the charred bits, saving the majority of it for our dinner, but it was a close one. “And, if you’re lucky, I won’t kill you with my cooking,” I added, this time with a genuine chuckle, which he returned.

  “Burnt food hasn’t killed me yet,” he said, getting two glasses down from the cupboard next to him. “I excel at overcooking.”

  “Amongst other things.”

  “Many other things,” he muttered under his breath, but I still heard him. He exited the kitchen, leaving me with the comment he’d left hanging between us and the tension that filled the room. With a sigh, I turned back to the food on the stove, thinking that was a far more pressing matter at the moment. I didn’t need to read into things Gabe had said.

  ***

  Gabe carried the plates of food out to the porch, wanting to watch the amazing sunset the storm had left in its wake. The shades of pink and lilac seemed unnatural, but they were gorgeous nonetheless, so I had no intention of arguing. It took me a minute to gracefully lower myself onto the top step, but I eventually did. Gabe handed me my plate, and I balanced it on my lap, waiting to start eating until he had himself situated.

  Sitting down across from me, he leaned against the main post that held up the porch roof and took a deep breath before picking up his fork.

  “Silent prayer?” I asked, taking a bite of the overcooked lasagna. The crusty edge was hard to chew, and I struggled to break it up enough to swallow. Gabe laughed at my dilemma.

  “Yep. Wanted to ask for a little divine intervention to keep me from choking tonight.”

  “Very funny,” I replied, shooting him a scathing look. “Everyone’s a critic.”

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself.”

  “Yeah, I got that.” Just to spite him, I took a huge piece of pasta and shoved it in my mouth all at once, chewing it dramatically for effect. It took some effort, but I swallowed it down and smiled with satisfaction.

  “You really are somethin’,” he said with a shake of his head, taking an equally large bite. He met my silent challenge without hesitation.

  “I’m a bit of a diamond in the rough, I imagine, but I’m pretty sure you could do worse for amnesiac companions.” He said nothing in response, only stared at me across the four feet of stairs that separated us. The weight of his gaze made me squirm. “I left some food for your mom too…I don’t really know how you work that out with her, but I wanted to make sure she had some.”

  Whatever heat I had seen in his gaze disappeared in an instant.

  “Thanks,” he said, his reply curt. I took a deep breath, exhaling slowly, which brought his attention back to me. “Something bothering you, Trouble?”

  Yeah. There was.

  I realized in that moment that there would never be a good time to broach the subject of his mother and her behavior, especially after everything he had opened up about in the truck. But I needed to make sense of what had happened between us in the crawl space. Maybe I didn’t have to share everything about what had gone down, but he needed to know that she had had some type of reaction to me. I needed him to make sense of it somehow, if that were even possible.

  And I figured there was no time like the present.

  “Gabe,” I said softly, looking off at the distant grey clouds. “I know you’re sensitive about your mother, and I understand that. Truly I do. But I feel like I have to tell you something, and I’m hoping you don’t take offense.” The clink of his fork being laid on his plate was my cue to continue. I turned to face him, his deep brown eyes focused on me. “Your mom…she got very agitated when you left the crawl space.”

  “Agitated h
ow?”

  I paused for a moment, not sure just how much I should reveal about the strange encounter. The woman had been mute for the past decade. I highly doubted he would believe that she suddenly, and conveniently, started to say bizarre things the second he left. With that in mind, I edited my story.

  “She grabbed my arm. It startled me at first, but when she wouldn’t let go, it kind of freaked me out.”

  “She grabbed you?’ he asked, his eyes narrowing. “Aggressively?”

  “Maybe she was just scared? For you? For all of us?” I offered, hoping to deflect any disbelief or anger that might have been brewing within him. “I don't pretend to understand what happened. I’m only telling you this because if it were me, I’d want to know, especially after how you reacted to the piano incident and seeing her out here when we got back.” He was quiet for a moment, just staring at me across the wide porch steps. “I swear I didn’t do a thing to her. I was exactly where I was when you left—”

  “She doesn’t like storms,” he said matter-of-factly before turning his gaze out to the dark grey horizon.

  “Oh,” was all I could muster in response.

  He sighed heavily, hanging his head as though what he was about to tell me was something he’d rather have kept to himself. A burden he was more than happy to bear.

  “Before my father died, my mom had…issues.” He looked up at me. There was a vulnerability in his expression that broke a piece of my heart. “Mental illness ran in my mother’s family. Each generation seemed to have someone that was prone to breaks with reality. I’d witnessed them so often growing up that they didn't really faze me.”

  “So she wasn’t well even then?”

  He shook his head.

  “Mom would be totally lucid, cooking dinner, then a knock on the door would set her into a trance of sorts. She’d sputter all kinds of nonsense when she got like that. Incoherent ramblings mostly.”

  My blood ran cold.

  “Did she ever make sense,” I asked quietly.

  “Sometimes…the words would make sense, but the message wouldn’t, if you know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “So certain events…they’d trigger this state?”

  He hesitated for a second, staring at me as if he’d seen a ghost.

  “Storms and strangers.” Holy. Shit. I checked off both of those boxes. “The only time she made a tiny bit of sense was when she would grab me by my arms and shake me lightly, saying over and over again that I needed to stay away from both. When I was a boy it used to scare me silly. My dad was the only one that could pull her from whatever dark place her mind went to when she got like that.”

  “And now he’s gone,” I whispered as the pieces of the puzzle all fell into place. His father’s death truly broke her in a way that I couldn’t have fathomed.

  Gabe nodded, clearing his throat.

  “She hasn’t been right since the moment I saw her following the accident. She just sat in that chair and stared off at the horizon. It didn’t take long to realize that she wasn’t coming back from wherever her mind had gone.” After a silent moment, he looked over at me. “Then you showed up—a stranger in a storm—and it seems like something deep inside her is trying to wake up. Like she’s trying to come back from whatever spell her mind’s been under.” He shook his head lightly. “The coincidence here isn’t lost on me.”

  “You think I’m upsetting her? Me being here?” I asked. The guilt I felt at the possibility impaled me.

  “I think you being here is doing something to her. You and the freak weather we’ve been havin’.” I didn’t really know what to say. Given what he’d just told me, I was likely causing the poor woman, who had been through so much already, undue stress.

  “What do you want me to do?” I could barely push the words past my lips, my throat tightening with fear. Fear of being forced to leave. Fear of being on my own. Fear of him turning me away.

  “I’m not gonna lie to you, Trouble. My kneejerk reaction here, for whatever reason, is to listen to what my mama always told me. But there’s a part of me that wonders if maybe I never heard her weird messages right. If maybe there was something in between the lines that I was supposed to read but didn’t. But most of all, I think that if you being here might bring her back to me, then here you’ll stay until your memory comes back or somebody comes a callin’ to claim you.”

  “So…I can stay? You’re not mad?”

  “Like I said, if you’re somehow able to pull her out of her state, I’d put up with just about anything from you.”

  I choked on a laugh, my relief plain.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I expect nothing less.” The slight curl of his mouth let me know that things really were going to be all right. For now.

  He stood up, the soft wood of the porch steps sagging under his weight. With his plate in one hand, he reached the other out to me, and I accepted, letting him pull me to my feet. For a second, we just stared at one another, both of us clearly replaying our conversation in our heads.

  When he started to walk inside, I blurted out the question that had nagged at me while he’d told me about his mother’s past.

  “You said your father knew how to pull her from whatever it was that came over her—her episodes.”

  He hovered in the doorway, not looking back at me.

  “Yeah.”

  I took a breath before I continued.

  “What was it? What did he do?”

  He stood there unmoving, his body tense.

  “He put her at the piano. The second she started to play, she was right as rain.”

  Chapter 9

  I went to bed that night reeling from all that had happened.

  I felt like the pieces of a puzzle were falling into place, but the picture it made still wasn’t clear. His mother’s illness made sense, especially in light of what Gabe had shared with me, but her reactions to me just seemed so strong. Stranger or not, something about it just didn’t sit right with me.

  Staring at the ceiling of the guest room, I tried to calm my mind. My efforts proved futile, so I threw back the covers and hopped over to the window. I looked out at the vast, dark night and the stars that peppered the sky with a heavenly glow. It was breathtaking.

  My eyes shifted down to the barn in the distance and the figure that exited it, illuminated only by the headlights of his nearby tractor. Gabe was still hard at work, most likely back from retrieving the dead horse’s body. That knowledge made my heart sink a little. I watched his silhouette stalk back and forth between the machine and the barn, his large frame highlighted. There was a familiarity to him that niggled at the back of my mind. His gait. His stature. His hair. The quiet confidence about him that I couldn’t deny. I could feel my brain working overtime to place something. Something it seemed unable to locate.

  I sighed in frustration, letting the curtain fall back in front of the window, then limped my way back to the bed, gently lowering myself to the edge. Why couldn’t I remember anything? At times I felt like my mind worked feverishly to do just that. But the second I felt as if I might have a breakthrough, it was as if something shut it down, leaving me just as clueless as I had been when I awoke in the cornfield. Was it possible that a part of me didn’t want to remember? Or worse yet, was there a reason why I shouldn’t want to? Was I saving myself from a reality I wasn’t ready to face—or couldn’t face?

  Could I live with never knowing who I really was?

  Could it be that I would never have a choice in the matter?

  Exhaling hard, I flopped back onto the bed and maneuvered my way under the covers. Sleep was what I needed, not more questions and mystery. I’d had enough of those to last a lifetime.

  Hopefully that wouldn’t forever be the case.

  ***

  Again, I dreamt of fire and flame.

  I scanned the wasted landscape but found little more than smoldering coals covering the ground, and smoke and ash filling the air. The g
rey haze made the visibility almost nonexistent, but I could see a faint light in the distance, a shadowy figure cutting its silhouette into the eerie glow. He stalked toward me, unfazed by the devastation around him. His focus was singular, his intent clear. He had come for me and me alone.

  “What have you done?” he asked, his voice low and harsh. “My God, sister, what have you done?”

  Guilt impaled me at his words, paralyzing me. His disgust was plain in his tone. And as he came toward me, almost visible through powdery gray ash falling from the sky, I took a step back. I wanted to run. To flee. To escape the punishment I knew I was about to incur.

  I turned to run, and his hands clamped down on my arms like a vise. My blood ran cold at his touch. My screams rang out through the cloud of smoke and ashes. And my desire for him to end me surged through my body.

  It would be best for everyone if he did.

  ***

  I shot up in bed, a cold sweat dewing all over my body. At least this time I’d managed not to bring Gabe running into my room in a panic with my cries. Maybe my post-traumatic stress reaction was slowly subsiding. My dream had been so much like the last, only this time, it was far clearer. Far more real. But was it a repressed memory or just some mental machination meant to permeate my subconscious with some riddle of truth? Clearly I was in no position to decipher which it was. All I was left with was confusion and an elevated heart rate.