The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors

by Michele Young-Stone

  Buckley stole his grandmother’s sleeping pills, wondering what he’d do when there were no more left, when Winter discovered they were gone. He wouldn’t think about that right now. Right now, he was in love. It was a good thing to be.

  Excerpt from

  THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS

  Lightning strike victims may have trouble wearing a watch that keeps time due to their altered electromagnetic fields interfering with the watch’s battery. This effect hasn’t been proven, but those victims who report it say the effect is temporary, lasting sometimes for months, sometimes for years.

  Researchers contend that lightning strike victims are more likely than the general population to become alcohol and drug dependent, seeking an escape from physical and mental side effects.

  [17]

  Kiss me, Kiss me, Kiss me, 1981

  On her way home from Carrie’s, Becca spots Kevin Richfield, fourteen now, standing in Bart Carlson’s yard. Bart too is fourteen, but he’s not good-looking like Kevin. He’s a fat bully.

  Kevin calls, “Hey! What are you doing?” It’s mid-October, but eighty-plus degrees. Shielding her eyes, Becca approaches Kevin. The sun is going down.

  “What are you doing?” he asks again.

  “Going home.”

  Kevin’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt that brings out the blue in his eyes. When Becca is nineteen, she’ll see Kevin’s eyes again in the eyes of her art professor, Christopher Lord, a.k.a. Apple Pie.

  “We’re playing hide-and-seek.”

  “You and Bart?” Becca looks at the two-man tent Bart keeps set up in his backyard for hide-and-seek, which isn’t really hide-and-seek anymore, now that Bart and Kevin are freshmen in high school; rather, it’s some deranged kissing version of the children’s game—or so she’s heard.

  “You and me could play?”

  Bart, holding the water hose, approaches and points the nozzle at Becca.

  “Grow up,” Kevin says, shielding Becca, and Bart shoots the water spray beside them instead of at them.

  “I’m just fooling, man.”

  “Stop fooling.”

  “I’m going home,” Becca interrupts.

  “Have you seen the inside of Bart’s tent?”

  “It’s a tent. I’ve seen a tent.”

  “Not with me.” Kevin smiles. His eyes are so bright. His arms, strong and tan.

  “I’m going to get something to eat,” Bart says.

  Kevin unzips the green tent door and pulls the two nylon flaps back. Becca ducks to avoid the top zipper. Inside the tent, Kevin crouches over her because it’s a low dome tent. Becca sits Indian-style on the slick nylon bottom, feeling the pointy twigs and rocks of Bart’s yard under her thighs. She has always wanted to talk, really talk, to Kevin Richfield, the boy who rode his bike past her house for three years, the boy she thought was her destiny.

  While she thinks dreamily, Kevin Richfield thrusts his tongue into her mouth. He slobbers on her face, and she feels the metal of his braces on her lips. He moves his tongue around hers. She tries to keep up with him. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. Then he stops. Unzips the tent door. He’s leaving.

  She says, “Do you want to kiss again?”

  “Not really.”

  “That was a good kiss.” What is she supposed to say?

  He says, “Thanks.” The tent flaps blow in the evening breeze.

  Kevin Richfield has crawled out of Bart Carlson’s tent, and Bart Carlson tries to crawl inside. Becca pushes her way past him. She’s twelve years old, being passed off to fat Bart Carlson. This is her first kiss.

  She runs home to nothing. Her mother is in bed—maybe sleeping, maybe passed out. Becca and Whiskers watch The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. Barbi Benton is guest-starring on The Love Boat. Becca wants to be Barbi Benton. Not for the big hair, the big teeth, or the big boobs, but for the earnest smile. No one, Becca thinks, is that great an actress. Barbi Benton must be the happiest girl in the world.

  • • •

  Six months later, shortly after her thirteenth birthday, Becca meets Irvin, Carrie’s bad-boy cousin from California. He’s staying with the Drinkwaters for a few months while his own parents try to figure out what to do with him, where to put him permanently. He’s trouble.

  Everything at Carrie’s house is different from Becca’s own home, which is now half empty. The Drinkwaters throw nothing away. Like Becca’s dad, they’re collectors, but rather than collecting coins and vintage sports cars, they collect dust, spilled salt, sponges soaked in bleach, dryer sheets, coffee cups, National Geographics, yarn, and bobby pins. There is never a clean surface.

  Laundry sits folded and piled on the kitchen chairs for weeks because the dressers and closets are full, and the furniture throughout their home is torn and scratched from the once stray cats Belinda has lured into the house with tuna fish and milk.

  Belinda says she can’t help loving the animals, and Carrie’s dad, Pete, shouts, “Goddamn it!” and says she’d better help it. The heavy shag carpets are flat and browned and smell sickly sweet like cat piss. The cats stretch and purr, drinking their milk on the kitchen counter as Belinda strokes their backs.

  Becca spends as much time as possible at the Drinkwaters’, and Pete says she’s his second daughter.

  It’s Friday night. They all watch TV. Carrie’s parents sit on the bigger, newer sofa in the den, and Irvin sits on the floor with his back against a small brown ottoman. Belinda yawns, her cross-stitch on her lap, glancing at the TV every few minutes. Becca watches her stitch.

  Irvin, who’s tall and rail thin, has a shaggy mop of black hair. He glances at Becca. He’s already told her that he thinks she’s mature for her age, that she’s pretty. Already he’s pressed his thigh against hers in the kitchen when no one was looking, and his thigh, that pressing of muscle against flesh, sent shivers through her body.

  Belinda says, “Do you want to see the pattern?”

  Becca scoots closer.

  “This is an easy one. The sill will be …” Belinda looks down at the plastic package in her lap. “Green. This green.” She pulls the color out.

  Pete shushes them and says, “Irvin, turn up the TV. I can’t hear shit with all this jabbering.” Pete lights a cigarette and puts his feet on the coffee table. He is a small but gruff man, and Becca is sometimes afraid of him despite his “second daughter” talk. “Now get the hell out of the way,” he says to Irvin. “Move.” Irvin, smiling at Becca, backs up to his place by the ottoman.

  At two in the morning, Irvin taps on the doorjamb of Carrie’s room, whispering, “Becca.” In the darkness, he strokes his chest.

  Becca recalls what he’s said: She’s pretty, mature for her age. So she is. So she wants to be.

  Careful not to wake Carrie, she follows Irvin down the hallway to the den. They sit on the shag together. Irvin picks up a National Geographic from the coffee table and flips through it in the darkness. Very little is said. Becca says, “I’ve never been to California,” and Irvin says, “You told me that already. It sucks anyway.”

  Irvin says, “I’m going to start my own band,” and Becca says, “That’s really cool. I like music.”

  Irvin says, “I’ll get you backstage passes when we play.” Becca says, “Cool.” How can she match backstage passes? She’s got it: “The same year I met Carrie, I got struck by lightning.”

  “Very cool.”

  She never thought of it that way. She’s very cool.

  Irvin leans in and kisses barely thirteen-year-old Rebecca Burke. He pokes his tongue between her lips. She thinks, I’m pretty good at this kissing thing, and feels Irvin’s fingers at her waist, slipping under the elastic of her pajama pants. She whispers, “What are you doing?” and he kisses her again, pulling at the springy waist of her pants. “No.”

  He sits beside her, his fingertips brushing the edge of her underwear below her hip bone. “Come on.” He pulls again at the elastic band.

  “You,” she says, s
itting up, her forearms folded at her waist. “You first.”

  Irvin grins. “I like you.” On his knees, he pushes his sweatpants down.

  “You’re not wearing any underwear.”

  “Touch it. Do it.”

  Becca has never seen a penis standing up before. She saw her dad’s a couple of times by accident when he’d just gotten out of the shower. She’s never seen anything like what is in front of her, attached to Irvin. Like a fat wrinkled finger. A pink snake. A gearshift in her dad’s ’61 Austin Healey. She holds on to it.

  Irvin says, “What are you doing? Rub it.”

  Then, as she’s rubbing up and down and up and down, he says, “Ouch.” On the carpet now, his pants around his ankles, Irvin lurches off the floor. “Be gentle.” With one hand on his forehead, hiding his eyes, he says, “Take it easy. It’s not a gearshift.” Funny, that’s just what she’d been thinking about. He moans when she gets it right. Becca is on her knees, concentrating. He says, “Ah,” and “ah” again. Then Becca puts her mouth around it. No prompting from Irvin. She’s heard about blow jobs before, and Irvin says, “Oh yes, oh yes,” and then he’s vibrating. His thighs shake.

  Wrapping his arms first around her neck, then around her waist, squeezing hard, he says, “I love you.”

  Since her dad left, she hasn’t felt anything close to happiness. Until now, that is. Until she made someone happy. Until Irvin said “I love you.” It was so easy to make him love her. This was her second kiss.

  If you want to dislike Irvin for taking advantage of Becca, don’t. Irvin Drinkwater genuinely loved Rebecca Burke when she was on her knees with his penis in her mouth. Love is sometimes fleeting.

  Excerpt from

  THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS

  Victims who feel their trauma has gone unrecognized may act out, seeking attention through outlandish behavior, including violent and sexual acts. There is the other extreme: where the victim withdraws completely from society, refusing to leave his home. Both extreme behaviors are considered “attention getting.”

  [18]

  Kill me, Kill me, Kill me, 1975

  Clementine told Buckley that in June she’d overdosed on pills. “Yellow jackets,” she said, “but the nurse called them Seconal.” The nurse at the clinic held her hand, brushed Clementine’s hair back from her face and asked if she was comfortable. “’How you doing, sweetie?’ is what she said. Sweetie. It made me want to be a nurse or something. She was so nice; I can’t explain.” She didn’t have to explain: Buckley knew about the kindness of strangers. Clementine continued, “The nurse told me I was too precious to kill myself, and I told her I’m not trying to die. I don’t want to feel pain anymore. That’s not the same as wanting to die.”

  Buckley thought, Yellow jackets and red devils—Winter’s sleeping pills. The devil with his pitchfork. The yellow jackets circling. Things that sting and prick.

  He massaged Clementine’s shoulders and looked through the front door of the shack at a boy sitting in the dirt. Buckley felt sad for Clementine. He felt sad for the boy crouched in the dirt. He felt sad for the whole world, what a waste it all was, but he felt glad too that Clementine had confided in him. He was glad that someone was finally being honest with him—the way his mother had been. He was determined to help Clementine. She blew her nose into a dirty tube top. “And then Scott came and got me, and the nurse said, ‘Don’t go, sweetie. Don’t go with him. You need to go home.’ She said, ‘You’re just a girl.’ Isn’t that sweet?” Clementine blew her nose into the tube top again.

  Chuck, Clementine’s new supplier and old man, ducked his head into the shack. “My turn,” he said. He shook a brown lunch bag and Buckley heard the loose pills dance inside the paper. “What did I say, Buckley? We’re a community. We share.”

  “See you later, Buckley.” Clementine’s face was anxious, but she smiled up at Chuck. “I’ll see you, Buckley.”

  The Reverend Whitehouse flung a mud-crusted boot at Buckley when he walked into the kitchen. “That girl’s a whore, boy.”

  “Who?”

  “You’re coming to church Saturday and Sunday. Do you hear me?”

  The reverend wasn’t a particularly mean man, just a cold man. A serious man making ridiculous demands with one thing in mind—his dwindling congregation.

  There were only thirty people in the reverend’s whole congregation, so if someone was missing, the Reverend John Whitehouse and Winter Pitank took notice. The missing someone, the lax congregant, got a Christian visit to remind the offender about the importance of his soul; to remind the ailing someone that this was not the end of the journey but only a stepping-stone to a better place; to remind the lost sheep that it wasn’t too late for him to give to the Lord, to return to the flock, to share the wealth the Lord bestowed—every last cent.

  After all, the reverend was a man who liked to eat. His girth showed that, and he couldn’t eat very well without money in his pocket and food on his table. He might’ve married his dead wife’s mother, the way she took care of him, if it weren’t inappropriate—the age difference. This was how the reverend thought.

  Buckley didn’t know what went on in the reverend’s mind; nor did he want to know. Once free of Mont Blanc, en route to the University of Arkansas, Buckley would never have to see his fat zucchini-nosed stepfather again. He might’ve hated him, but he couldn’t waste that much energy on the man.

  Buckley tossed the reverend’s boot back over toward the kitchen table. The reverend whispered, “How is she, anyway?”

  “Who?”

  “Your little girlfriend. How is she?” The reverend glanced through the window at Winter out front, parking the truck. “Come on, Buck.”

  As Buckley walked toward the bathroom, shaking his head in disgust at what the reverend suggested, the reverend called, “You’re a weird boy.”

  Sitting on the toilet, his shorts around his ankles, Buckley thought of Clementine’s story. She had said her dad called her a whore and a freak and told her to get out of his house. He’d said, “You’re dead to me.” Maybe it was better not to know his father than to have a father like Clementine’s.

  Clementine told Buckley, “He’s a bastard.” Buckley knew she was never going home. She said, “If I’m dead to him, he’s dead to me.”

  Buckley told Clementine his mother really was dead. He broke down and told Clementine that after the lightning hit, when they were trying to lift her to the dock, he could see her brain. The lightning had burned her and split her head open, and he knew she was dead. He told Clementine that if there was a god, which he seriously doubted, then that god was unjust. She agreed, adding, “God’s a bastard too.”

  Taking his hands in hers, she said, “You can touch me.”

  “That’s okay.” He didn’t feel right about it anymore, now that Chuck was around. Chuck could give her the drugs she craved. Buckley brought canned food and candy bars. Chuck delivered pacification in paper bags.

  The bathroom was small like the rest of the house, and Buckley propped his feet on the bathtub. He remembered wanting to feel good like Clementine, wanting to feel numb, and Clementine said the world was unbearable without the pills. She said she wanted to feel nothing all the time. She loved being numb. Buckley, on the other hand, felt he deserved to live in pain.

  He remembered the day after his mother’s funeral, telling Joan Holt and Padraig John that he needed to call his grandmother and the reverend. He remembered feeling no allegiance to his stepfather or his grandmother, but feeling he deserved Mont Blanc. He deserved misery. It was his fault that his mother was dead, even though Padraig John said, “It’s nobody’s fault, Buckley.” Even though Joan Holt said, “You can stay here with me. I’m your surrogate grandmother.” Buckley felt that he didn’t deserve to be happy when his mother was dead.

  At sixteen, Buckley had received letters from both Paddy John and Joan Holt. Each of them wrote to Buckley to ask about school. To ask when he might visit Galveston. To see how he
was making out in Arkansas. To tell him that they still mourned the loss of his mother—recalling daily the funny things she’d say and the way she was entranced by the ocean. They missed her. They missed him. Padraig John, two months after Abigail’s death, wrote:

  September 16, 1973

  Dear Buckley,

  I hope all is good for you back home. We sure miss you here. Tide keeps asking when you’re coming back. He took to you like a brother. I know it’s not fair of me to ask anything of you, but I need to ask this question, and if you can’t or don’t want to answer it or don’t know the answer, I understand, and maybe I already know the answer. I hope I do, but did your mother love John Whitehouse? How come she run away from there? Do you think she loved me? I loved her very much, and even with the days passing, my feelings for your mother remain.

  I hope that you are doing good in Arkansas. Your mother loved you so much. She always said you were a good boy. I hope that we can keep in touch, and that you know me and Tide are here for you if you need anything.

  Your friend,

  Padraig John

  Buckley drafted multiple responses to Padraig John (as he did to Joan Holt) but didn’t send one letter. He couldn’t. It was too painful. Nonetheless, the letters from Joan Holt and Padraig John kept coming, and when Buckley was with Clementine, swallowed up in a junk food, warm beer, dirt-encrusted haze, he remembered his old life and knew he’d made a mistake leaving Galveston. Then he reminded himself that he couldn’t have stayed and lived his life there with his mother dead in the ground.

  No.

  He didn’t deserve to be happy, but it was with Clementine when he sometimes forgot that he didn’t deserve happiness. It was Clementine who poked at his ribs to make him laugh. Who asked Buckley to keep talking when the walls were closing in, when the sleeping bag, damp under her warm hands, felt like taffy, like it would suck her in and choke her.

  The reverend shouted, “Did you fall in?”