The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors

by Michele Young-Stone

  For Becca, that was the greatest compliment. She knew it wasn’t her best rendering. She’d used a stick of charcoal, focusing on the lines in her grandmother’s face, on the crow’s-feet around the eyes. Her grandma’s face was like her stories, the lines branching in a hundred directions, disconnected.

  “Can I play with the dog?”

  “You can play with that mutt to your heart’s content. I’d let you take him home with you, but he’s no city dog. He’s used to country, like me.”

  Getting dressed, Becca said, “Did Mom tell you I got struck by lightning?”

  “No. What’s that do to you?”

  “It makes you special.”

  “That’s obvious.”

  “Thanks, Grandma.”

  “For what?”

  “Believing me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I believe you.”

  Her grandma’s farm was big: a green lawn surrounded by bluebells, stinging nettles, and wild berries enclosed in barbed wire. Beyond the wire, the land sloped to a pasture where horses grazed. Becca held on to a fence post, looking out at the green mountains, dizzying in the distance. To the west she saw an old silo and barn bulging with hay.

  All day into night, she played with the mutt Bo. When darkness fell, she and the old dog had a parade with fireflies. Becca thought the fireflies were drawn to her because she’d been struck by lightning. Bo played every animal, from Clydesdale to elephant, and every performer, from drum major to baton twirler, while Becca was the grand marshal. Grandma Edna came outside with a mason jar (“So you can catch one”) but Becca left the jar in the grass. She didn’t want to trap the fireflies’ light—like putting them in prison. They might not like her anymore if she did.

  After the fireflies had gone to wherever they go when it gets really dark, Becca and Bo settled beneath an oak, his snout on her thigh. She told him about the note she swiped from her mother’s jewelry box. “It’s not a big deal, except that it says ‘Rowe.’ That’s my dad’s nickname. His mother called him that.” Bo grunted as though he understood.

  THE STRAWBERRY NOTE:

  Rowe,

  I’ll be a half hour late.

  Patty

  “It’s nothing really,” she told Bo, “but I wanted to read it. Carrie says that no one should read another person’s private letters, but I wonder if that’s true when the other person is your husband.”

  Understandably, Bo had no comment.

  Becca said, “I have the letter now.”

  The next day, Becca and Grandma Edna heard Mary scream. Becca said, “What was that?” They were in Grandma Edna’s bedroom. The scream came from upstairs. Becca led Edna up the rickety basement steps to the dining room. The heavy red curtains were ripped from their hooks. The room filled with sunlight, making it hard to see.

  Mary looked up at the young Becca and the old Edna. “I think she’s overdosed. Call an ambulance!” Claire sat listless, wrapped in one of the drapes, dust particles rising into the summer light.

  At Farmville General, the hospital people in mint green scrubs mea sured from Aunt Claire’s nose to her ear, from her ear to her breastbone. They marked a tube and guided it through her nostril, farther and farther, and they ordered, “Swallow. Don’t fight this.”

  Aunt Claire gagged and choked. She fought. “Go on and swallow,” they said. They slid a syringe into the end of the tube and plunged something down the line. They said, “You’re doing just fine.” With another syringe, they drew fluid out. There was another syringe and another, and Aunt Claire coughed. She jerked right and left, shaking the gurney and spattering chalky vomit onto a male nurse and the institutional tile. She cried. Then, soon after, she was quiet.

  Becca was there, invisible to the nurses and doctor, her back pressed against the wall, one hand covering her mouth. She wasn’t scared exactly. She was shocked at the physicality, the force it took, to empty someone’s stomach. She felt nauseated, like she might never eat again.

  Grandma Edna and Becca’s mother were in the waiting room, filling out paperwork. They’d misplaced Becca, who was down the corridor in a curtained room, waving to Claire, who’d been wheeled down the hall to some new place with an institutional floor and the smell of disinfectant. There was a man mopping the vomit. There were two nurses dropping tubing and syringes into stainless-steel boxes marked with skulls and crossbones.

  Despite Becca’s wild red hair and Holly Hobbie shirt and matching jeans, no one saw her. She listened as one of the nurses, the skinnier of the two, said, “She’s going to be fine. She’s lucky she has some meat on her bones. Her metabolism saved her life. Not like this case I worked in Arkansas, in this little town, Mont Blanc. You wouldn’t have heard of it. There was this girl, a beanpole, with black hair and doe eyes. She was such a pretty thing. A young girl with so much potential. I still remember her name: Clementine. She shook me up. I wondered if I was in the wrong profession. Anyway, this poor girl was basically homeless, living in this god-awful commune, Drop Out City. Some people never give up trying to die. She was one of them.”

  The nurses spotted Becca. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”

  “I’m lost.”

  “The waiting room’s down there.”

  The other nurse said, “I need a smoke.”

  Becca left to find her mother and grandma, to tell them that Claire would be okay—at least for now. She hoped that Claire wasn’t one of those girls who’d never give up trying to die.

  That night the wind gusted. It rattled the chairs on the side porch and knocked a wind chime to the concrete. The rain came in spurts. Bo whined outside and pawed at the screen of the basement window. Grandma Edna shut the window and went back to her bedroom to watch TV.

  Becca went upstairs and watched the storm through the curtainless dining room windows. She was sweating badly, and as the thunder grew louder, she worried that the lightning had come for her. Was that possible? She needed Bo. She needed him safe.

  The lightning lit the mountains a soft purple and split the sky in two. Becca’s hands were clammy and cold. She wiped the sweat from her lip and moved a few feet back from the window. There had been thunderstorms and lightning since the day she was struck, but nothing like this. With a sharp cracking sound, the lightning parted the sky, illuminating the barbed-wire fence in the distance.

  The front door to the farm house had double doors and required a skeleton key. She needed that key. Becca found her mother in the abandoned kitchen, reading a book. She said, “Mom, I need your help.”

  “I love a good thunderstorm,” she said, “though I know you’re not a big fan.” Her mother put down the book. “Aunt Claire’s going to be all right, Becca. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.” Mary seemed gleeful sitting in an old recliner with her calves tucked under her thighs. Now it was clear that Aunt Claire was the crazy one. Not her. She continued: “Claire will need someone to talk to, a therapist … what your dad calls a head doctor. But that’s nothing to be ashamed of. It doesn’t mean that she’s weak-minded. Not really.” Mary smiled. “It’s understandable, when you think about it, considering she’s a grown woman still living with her mother in the middle of nowhere with no job.”

  Becca had other concerns. “Do you know where the key that unlocks the front door is?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mary rolled her eyes and picked up her book.

  “Because Bo needs to come inside.”

  “Bo will be fine, Becca. He’s weathered plenty of storms.” Mary turned the page.

  “No. He’s not safe. I can feel it.”

  “I’m trying to read, honey. Find something to do.”

  “Mom, please.”

  “Bo can’t come inside, Becca. Your grandma doesn’t want a wet dog in her house, not even in her basement kitchen.”

  “But I’ve seen him in the house.”

  “On rare occasions. He’s an outside dog, a country dog.”

  �
�Please, Mom. Please.”

  Mary sighed. “All right.” She set down her book.

  Becca followed her mother to the library, where Mary pulled a skeleton key off a gold hook. Mary said, “If your grandmother asks, I had nothing to do with this.” Mary unlocked the double doors where the pine coat rack once stood—where her work boots had once rested. She hated this place.

  No one used this main door anymore, and when Mary pushed the one door open, there was a loud sucking noise. Mother and daughter stood in the cramped doorway, Becca calling for Bo, the rain beating down. She walked out onto the covered porch to look for him. “Maybe he’s still by the kitchen window.” The wind gusted and swirled, lifting a pointed holly leaf off the porch. She called his name again: nothing. “Come on, Bo. Come on.”

  “He’s got sense, Becca. He’s probably under the house or under a tree or something.”

  Becca paced the porch. The bursts of rain blew sideways, sprinkling her shirt. “Bo!” Lightning touched down across the yard, and she spotted Bo heading their way. “Good boy. Here he comes.” Her mother patted the pockets of her jeans, feeling for her lighter.

  As Mary turned the lighter’s flint, thunder exploded and the black sky flared white. Becca did not see the lightning clobber his head, but as she rushed toward Bo in that second of white stillness, never pausing, not suspended this time, not in shock this time, refusing to lose time again, she knew he was hit. Her mother was fixed on the porch, leaning with her shoulder against a column, the lighter in her right hand, an unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth. How could this have happened? Bo’s fur sizzled in spots. His skull was split open and blood trickled over his left eye onto his nose. Becca touched his wet nose, soft and cool despite the steam rising from his burned body. Becca, struggling to breathe, lay on top of him. The heat from his fur blackened her T-shirt. She saw one of his paws twitch. She tried lifting him, to carry him inside where it was dry and he might live, but she couldn’t. He wouldn’t budge. She covered him with her body, protecting him from the new burst of rain and exploding light. Holding him, wishing he would live.

  Becca’s mother grabbed Becca from behind, sliding her hands under Becca’s arms, pulling her off the dog. Becca hung like a puppet in her mother’s arms. Her shirt was splotched with blood and smelled of burnt hair. Her mother said, “Walk. There’s nothing we can do. Walk!” Becca wouldn’t walk, and only ten feet from Bo’s burned body, her mother dropped Becca on the wet grass. She couldn’t carry her any farther.

  Becca crawled back through the rain to Bo. “Don’t die.” She knew he was gone, but she still hoped for a miracle.

  Her mother ran for the house. “Mom, I need your help! Mom!”

  Becca felt the old woman’s hand on her back. The rain beating down. The old woman’s hand so unlike the feel of the lifeless, the dead. The old woman’s hand so unlike the feel of electricity moving through arms and legs. “Come on,” Grandma Edna said. “It’s time to go inside.”

  Becca looked up, the rain striking her face. “I killed Bo.”

  “Oh, sugar,” Grandma Edna said. “You didn’t kill Bo. No one killed Bo. The Lord took him from us.”

  Becca rose from the ground. “We can’t just leave him out here.”

  “We won’t,” Grandma Edna said. “I’ll get the wheelbarrow and we’ll make sure he has a burial that befits him.”

  Becca grudgingly obeyed, sobbing as she left Bo in the grass, beneath black skies and pouring rain.

  Later that night, sitting in the bathtub, rubbing a bar of Safeguard on her knees, washing away the caked dirt and dried blood, Becca thought about Aunt Claire—trying to kill herself when life is so precious; when zap, in an instant, someone can die. She thought, I will never be like Aunt Claire.

  Old Man John, who lived in one of the trailers up the road, “a good colored man,” according to Grandma Edna, dug a grave for Bo. Becca chose the spot—close to the barbed wire, where Bo could look out and see the mountains. Old Man John wrapped Bo in a sheet, and Becca snuck an Oscar Mayer hot dog from the refrigerator. She gave it to Old Man John to stash inside the sheet. The four Wickle women along with Old Man John held a service early in the morning. Becca said, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we’ll miss you,” and Mary thought, Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, we know Major Tom’s a junkie. Claire wondered if the love of her life, Tom, knew she had tried to commit suicide. She wondered if he’d call. Grandma Edna envied the youth all around her and thought, Goodbye, Bo. You were a good and loyal dog. I think that’s Clayton’s favorite sheet. God rest that SOB. Edna clutched the handkerchief her mother had given her on her wedding day. Mary decided she’d buy Becca a dog to make up for all this death, and Old Man John, who stood a few feet back because he didn’t know Bo all that well, thought about his own dog, Sadie, who was getting up there in years. He thought about one day having to dig Sadie’s grave and then dismissed those awful thoughts. Instead, he remembered that he had to replace one of his gutters that’d gotten knocked loose in the storm. He’d start on that gutter first thing.

  Grandma Edna sat in a straight-backed chair, pulling green beans from a paper bag. “Your mom’s in the den.”

  Reaching into the bag, Becca took a seat.

  The kitchen was cool, a breeze blowing through the tiny window above the sink. Becca said, “I miss Bo.”

  “Me too. He was old like me, you know. He had a good long life. He used to sleep right outside that window with his head on his paw. I can still see him there. That’s the funny thing about memory.” Grandma Edna’s narrow shoulders were hunched, her bright silver hair lit up like tinsel by the spot of morning sun that seeped through the cinder-block-sized window. She wore blue polyester slacks and a matching shirt.

  Becca said, “My mom has bad memories.”

  Grandma Edna changed the subject as she was apt to do—quickly. She said, “Marianne Pamplin brought the worst potato salad you’ve ever tasted to the church dinner last Wednesday. I expected the reverend to eat it, but dear Lord, they all ate it. Everybody went on and on about the stuff and how delicious it was.” Grandma Edna laughed. “The poor dear has no idea how bad it is. I told them, the lot of ’em, that they shouldn’t have gone on so about it, not with how awful it tasted. Not with them being in God’s house.” Grandma Edna wiped two tears from her high cheekbones. “I’ll be,” she said, having brought herself to hysterics.

  “Which one is she?” Becca asked.

  “She’s Marianne.”

  They snapped the tips off the beans, dropping them in the colander. Grandma Edna told stories about more people Becca didn’t know. She talked about a man named Freddie. Blond and blue-eyed, he was tan from working in the sun. “He worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps. He built the cabins and trails at Twin Lakes. One night, he showed up here. Clayton was in Norfolk.”

  Grandma Edna never referenced time when she spoke, which made her stories even more confusing. Becca said, “And what happened?”

  “Nothing. We ate what I had: snaps, cured ham, and biscuits. Lord, he was a fine-looking man. Hardworking too; he smelled like the earth. Spent enough days digging in the dirt.” Grandma Edna seemed far away. “I let him clean up. Just as times were different then, people were different too. I guess we rise or sink according to our times.”

  “Are we still talking about Freddie?”

  Grandma Edna popped a bean into her mouth. “His hair was the color of sand.”

  Becca felt the smoothness of the bean between her fingers. “And we’re still talking about Freddie?”

  “We are.”

  Becca said, “Can I show you a trick?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “I need your watch.”

  Grandma Edna got her timepiece from the sink’s edge and handed it to Becca, who slipped the braided watch onto her wrist.

  “Don’t break my watch!”

  “I’m not.” She said, “Just wait. Watch the hands.”

  Grandma Edna leaned in close. “What a
m I seeing?”

  “Just watch.”

  Nothing happened.

  “Has it happened yet?”

  “No. Keep looking!”

  “I thought maybe I was supposed to be seeing something but with these grandma eyes I was missing what ever it was.”

  “Wait, Grandma. You’ll see.”

  Grandma Edna stared at the gold hands of her own wrist-watch, waiting for time to do what it always does: tick away. But that isn’t what she saw. She saw what Becca saw. She saw the second hand move counterclockwise: one second, two seconds. Grandma Edna sat up straighter in her chair.

  “Did you see it?”

  “I did! I do!” Grandma Edna was book-learned, no “simpleton” as Rowan Burke assumed. Remembering a quote she’d years ago forgotten, Clocks slay time … time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life, she smiled. Becca was a smart girl. Edna couldn’t remember the author of the quote, but he was someone important.

  Whether or not the second hand actually moved counterclockwise was in the eye of the beholder, as with all things, but what’s certain is that the old, like the young, can sometimes see shades and nuances that those who are too busy with life’s minutiae, too busy rifling through the past and seeking blame, fail to see. Grandma Edna saw the fingertips of a child propel time backward. The old, like the young, feel time slipping away. Grandma Edna felt her life was like flour in a sieve, the last bits of white dust clinging to mesh. Hold on.

  Hearing the bad news about Bo, Becca’s dad adopted a black mutt called Whiskers. Although he was not fond of domesticated animals because of the dirt and hair, this was a great opportunity to turn a negative situation into a positive one, making him look good.