Above The Thunder

by Renee Manfredi

  “Were you deterred?” Anna asked.

  “Was I deterred? I am an Italian male. Only death could have deterred me.”

  Serafina refused to even speak to him, wouldn’t meet his eye. “Though I’d seen the dio lampo, the divine lightning strike her the same time it struck me. I knew. I felt her heart turn toward me.” Finally, at a St. Joseph’s Day celebration, he insisted that she dance with him. She agreed after this night to go walking with him the next day. The whole family came along, trailing the couple like pages behind a royal court. This was how they dated for two weeks. One night, miraculously, George got her father’s reluctant permission to take Serafina with him to the city for a movie. Two maiden aunts rode with them on the trolley, sat two rows behind them in the theater, muttered in Italian, and knitted their way through The African Queen. He hadn’t so much as kissed her. He hadn’t held her hand. But he said he knew that she was to be his wife. He would not take no for an answer. Not from her father or the flatulent aunts behind him, not even from Serafina’s own modest reluctance. After the movie, they strolled along the streets, came upon a jewelry store, closed for the night. In the window were diamond engagement rings. He cupped her elbow and drew her forward. “Pick one out,” he said, his heart pounding so hard that he could barely hear his own voice. He held his breath. The wheezing aunts, having finally caught up, were silent. It seemed to him that they, too, were holding their breath.

  “That one,” she said, and pointed to one in the back, her answer and her choice in one smooth motion. She turned to him and smiled. And he kissed her, without any interference from the tias. A month later, they were married.

  “Wow,” Anna said. “Wow. And are you still together?”

  “She died two years ago. We were married thirty-eight years.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and fell silent.

  A few seconds passed. “So, tell me, Anna. Where are your loved ones now? Jack and…I forget the name of his partner.”

  “Stuart. They’re in Boston.”

  “Boston.” It sounded to Anna’s ears like a reprimand. She laughed.

  “Will you reestablish with them?”

  “Reestablish?”

  “I mean, reconnect.”

  Anna said certainly, just not right now.

  “What are your plans? What will you do now?”

  “I can’t tell you that. I simply don’t know. This, anyway, wasn’t the life I was intending to lead.” He was silent. She felt him watching her. “Well, it was a good life. But a whole phase has ended,” she said.

  “For me, also. For everybody, eventually,” George said.

  Anna murmured agreement. She tipped the bottle to the wineglass they’d been sharing, but it was empty.

  “Would you like some more wine? I have some in my car. My vintage, of course.”

  Anna almost said yes. There was something about this man that she found comforting and comfortable. But she felt tipsy as it was, light-headed from the hot water. “That’s really tempting. But, unfortunately, I think I’ve had too much as it is. I’ll have to take a raincheck. Are you camping here tonight?”

  “Sadly, no. I’ve been coming here on the weekends to soak, but I have never camped. Had I known there would be a beautiful woman here tonight, I would have transformed myself into an outdoorsman.”

  “Well,” she said. “It’s been lovely talking to you.” She held out her hand. He took it and kissed it.

  In an awkward moment, she realized that she was going to have to walk the three or four feet to the tree to get her robe. She half-stood. “Look at that moon up there,” she said.

  He laughed, and she got out when he turned his head.

  “Anna?” he called.

  “Yes?”

  “I am going to ask you to have dinner with me tomorrow night.”

  “Well,” she said. “Then I am going to say yes.”

  “Do you know the area?” She said that she didn’t. “There’s a good French restaurant. I’ll come and get you at seven. But of course maybe you want the option of changing your mind. You might think later I am some sort of pazzo, a crazy man.”

  “No,” Anna said, “I’d like to share a meal with you.”

  “Yes?” He paused. “Then here’s what I will do. I’ll give you directions to the place, and you can drive yourself. That way, you can decide. Naturally, I am hoping I’ll see you, but I’ll understand if you think twice. How about that?”

  “That sounds good. I look forward to it,” she said.

  “And as I said,” George said.

  Anna turned back. “Yes?”

  “As I told you, I am an Italian male. So if you say no, I’ll just have to pursue you more intently. If you want my advice, you should show up. Even if you’re not interested. Especially if you’re not interested.”

  Anna laughed, and said he’d just have to wait to find out.

  Later, after she heard George drive off, she lay awake in her tent a long time. She got up finally, took out her microscope and her favorite slide of Flynn’s. There was a good moon tonight, bright, nearly full. She looked up at the stars, then down through the lens at the milky galaxy of her granddaughter’s white cells. She ran her eyes over the monocytes and nutraphils, the basophils and leukocytes until it seemed as though she were moving through them, the white cells as dense and impenetrable as a blizzard. She stared at a cluster of monocytes in the upper left corner until she felt herself relax among the familiar configurations. She had memorized this particular slide the way others memorized passages of poetry. She let her mind wander, remembered the afternoon she checked Jack’s T-cells and tested Stuart for the virus, the golden light of that day and the three of them driving through its path. She saw George’s devout mother with her rosaries; the beads, too, Anna imagined, saw the old woman’s gnarled fingers moving over each mooth cool stone, round as globes, dark as planets, turning now into the jade beads of a broken bracelet that fell to the floor, one by one. Anna looked away for a moment, then repositioned the microscope so that the slide under the lens caught the moonlight. Next to her granddaughter’s blood cells was the reflected galaxy, the stars and planets and everything in the night sky. In this way, Anna thought, everything was connected. The carbon in the stars was the same carbon found in human bones. The true shape of everything was a circle. The moon and earth and the cells of a body, a bowl full of berries and a cluster of grapes. Even the future curved back through memory. She watched, in the corner of the slide, as the clouds drifted by, thought of Jack and Stuart and Marvin, Poppy and Hugh, and of course the girl she cherished above all others—everyone in her past, those still with her, and the people yet to come. She felt the tidal tug of her granddaughter’s body in her own pulling her toward some shore, the sea both inside her and out. This, maybe, was Anna’s blessing for now: Flynn’s cells, little light-years, illuminating the ancient time of stars, the constellations above and below, and the heavens that were everywhere.