The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors

by Michele Young-Stone

  From Paddy John’s deck, the sky, the water, and the ground melded fuming white. Inside the kitchen, Sissy saw nothing but translucent brightness and her hands glowing pink in dish soap.

  The first drops of rain fell. Becca cowered at the edge of the dune. She heard her mother’s voice. She heard Paddy John. She was not dead. She ought to be dead. The rain felt good on her back. She couldn’t move. Then she felt her mother’s hands on her back and on her shoulders. Her mother’s hands, the touch of skin—so unlike the feel of electricity. She heard the sky open up. She heard her mother say, “Becca, honey, are you all right?”

  She heard Paddy John say, “Goddamn it,” and before she raised her head, she knew.

  “Come on, Becca,” her mother said. In the wind-driven rain, Becca crawled toward Buckley’s burned body. She took Buckley’s right hand in hers. The lightning had split his palm open, and in the rain, his palm was sticky with blue-black blood. Paddy John cursed, “Goddamn it.” Buckley’s ankles and his feet were burned. Paddy John, on his knees, clutched fistfuls of wet sand. The lightning touched down all around them. Carrie froze on the dune. Paddy John shouted, “Motherfucker! Motherfucker!” Ambulance sirens sounded in the distance, and Becca screamed, “Somebody call 911!”

  Mary said, “Sissy’s calling. Sissy’s calling.”

  You’ve read excerpts of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, so you know that witnesses to lightning strikes suffer from shock similar and sometimes comparable to the victim’s shock. As a matter of fact, witnesses are often conduits, like parallel transformers, their bodies transporting the positive electrical charge returning to the cloud or the negative charge meeting the ground. In simpler terms, the lightning had touched them all.

  Becca thought, Call a fucking ambulance. Call a fucking ambulance. It should’ve been me. How many thoughts can fill someone’s head in a matter of seconds, like a bad pop song that won’t go away? Becca thought, Call a fucking ambulance. Call a fucking ambulance. Call a fucking ambulance. Call a fucking ambulance was mantra. It was rhythm. It was the pulse of electricity traveling through Becca’s veins.

  Mary said, “Let’s get you inside. Come on, Bec.” She saw her daughter’s toes. “Jesus, honey. Jesus.”

  Becca’s toes were scorched deep purple. The sky cracked white and orange and gold down the beach. The light played across the water in red circles. God’s fireworks. In Becca’s head, clusters of fish washed up gaping on the beach. The wet sand struck Becca’s back like a million prickling toothpicks.

  She moaned. She pressed her cheek to Buckley’s chest to feel his breathing. To feel his heartbeat. Nothing. She thought, It should’ve been me, and Call a fucking ambulance. Paddy John held his fistfuls of sand. “God can’t do this to me.”

  Mary said, “We need to get off the beach. Come on.” The lightning played around them, pounding and sputtering and splitting the sky white.

  Call a fucking ambulance, call a fucking ambulance. The pop song in Becca’s head turned to Treat the apparently dead. Treat the apparently dead first. Becca straddled Buckley’s waist. With two fingers, she traced his bottom rib until she found that knot of cartilage. She was afraid. She counted two fingers up. With one hand on top of the other, she pressed down two inches deep into his chest. One, she counted. Two, three, four, and up to fifteen. She got off and pressed her mouth to his wet lips. One breath. Another breath. His lips were warm despite the rain, and she was methodical. Her mother pulled at the straps on Becca’s dress. “We have to get off the beach.” Becca pressed down and counted again. The ocean and sand melded white in a deafening blast. Becca’s mother shouted, “Becca! Becca!” but Becca heard, Treat the apparently dead first, and one, two, three, four … One breath. And another. She counted and she breathed into Buckley’s mouth.

  She heard the sound of her breath forcing its way into Buckley’s chest. She heard the five words over and over again: Treat the apparently dead first. As the lightning played around them, Becca’s mother pulled again on Becca’s dress and the yellow daisy shoulder straps tore loose. The straps were in Becca’s mother’s hands. Becca wouldn’t stop. She was Buckley’s heart. Paddy John grabbed Mary. The sky cracked open translucent violet. Paddy John saw Mary’s hair electrified about her face. Mary said, “Buckley’s dead. Buckley’s dead.” She remembered Bo: her daughter sopping wet, covering the body of a dead dog. “Becca, Buckley’s dead.”

  Mary, breaking free from Paddy John, grabbed Becca’s right arm and her wrist. Becca pressed down on Buckley’s chest, turning to Paddy John, the old man dripping gray in the flashing light and darkness. She said, “Get her away from me.”

  Becca breathed for Buckley. She pumped his heart.

  The paramedics rushed the beach. Their orange pant legs swished in the dying rain. One of them cupped Becca’s body from behind, wrapping his arms around hers. He grabbed ahold of her wrists. She realized that her back ached. Her lips were numb. “That’s enough,” he said. “That’s enough. We got it.” The rain drip-dropped onto the beach. Lifting Becca up, he shouted over the dune, “We need two stretchers.”

  “Don’t stop!” she screamed.

  The paramedic held Becca against his chest.

  “Don’t stop! He can’t die.”

  The paramedic shouted, “Stat.”

  Excerpt from

  THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS

  10% of lightning strike victims die.

  A direct cloud-to-ground strike, lightning entering and exiting a person’s head, almost always results in death.

  Paramedics are not miracle workers. When a heart stops beating and won’t start again, there is nothing anyone can do.

  To the survivors reading my book, I offer this advice: Don’t feel guilty. Lightning is random. Don’t feel embarrassed. Don’t feel afraid. You are no closer to death than anyone else. You are a survivor.

  [43]

  Aftermath, 1995

  Today was day four. Becca, her toes wrapped in white gauze, hobbled down the sunlit corridor of Norfolk General Hospital. The streams of light played on the patients’ hospital room doors like black and ivory piano keys, and Becca saw a blue-tipped angel flit across the tiles. With a squint, she saw that the blue-tipped angel was Carrie, a cardigan draped over her shoulders, the sleeves loose about her arms like wings.

  In Becca’s room, the two friends lay on their backs, Carrie gonging her sandal heels into the metal bed frame. Becca unwrapping a piece of bubble gum, her freckled arms like two lightning rods above her head. Carrie’s heels gonged. The sun cast shadows of willow tree leaves on the beige hospital wall.

  With good friends, with best friends, it’s all right to be quiet.

  Flowers and cards, which had started arriving day one, crowded Becca’s hospital bureau. Her mother had phoned practically everyone in Becca’s address book to say, “I just thought you should know … Becca’s in the hospital. She’s been struck by lightning.” In addition to receiving a card and a bunch of daisies from Lucy and Jack, Becca got flowers from Paulo (with an attached note—I can’t fucking believe you got struck by lightning! Your mom says you’re going to be fine. I miss you. Get well soon. Love, Paulo) and a card from Sue of Sue’s Gallery (a standard get-well wish, despite the circumstances). And even her old boss Spencer sent a ridiculous hospital gift-shop bear wearing a hat that read GET WELL SOON.

  Aunt Claire and Uncle Tom sent yellow tulips and a card with a picture of Grandma Edna inside. After so many years, Becca still missed her Grandma Edna.

  On the morning of day one, Becca swore she saw Grandma Edna leaning forward at the foot of her hospital bed, Edna’s freckled hands pressed into the white blanket. She said, “Buck up! Are you feeling all right? Of course you’re feeling all right. So, you won’t wear toenail polish for a while. So what!”

  Becca said, “I miss you.” Mary was stroking Becca’s hair then, and the doctor said, “She’s fine. The painkiller in her IV’s pretty strong.”

  Paddy John was there t
oo, and he said, “I told you she’d be all right, Mare.”

  Becca said, “Where’s Bo?”

  Grandma Edna whistled. She said, “I have to go,” but she didn’t go right away, not before Bo leapt onto the bed.

  “You’re a good boy,” Becca said, feeling the dog’s bristly snout at her cheek.

  The doctor said, “The painkiller,” explaining Becca’s apparent hallucinations, and Mary said, “You’re going to be good as new,” stroking her daughter’s arm.

  Grandma Edna smoothed the hospital blanket with her spotted hands, which smelled of some sort of fruit, and Becca fell asleep.

  On day two, Rowan, who was testifying yet again, this time in Washington, D.C. (and who was not the first person Becca’s mother notified about the lightning strike), sent a lavender and gold orchid, a flower Becca would certainly kill trying to transport it back to New York. The man has no common sense, she thought as she tore open the card’s envelope. He had written:

  Bec,

  I thank God you’re all right. Your mom said you’re a hero. I told her I already knew that.

  When they let you go home, please come to Cedar Island. Don’t go back to New York. You know my house is too big for me. We could go fishing on the sound. You could paint. There’s plenty of space for a studio. Mi casa es su casa.

  I love you, Piddle,

  Dad

  She’d been a real waterfall since Buckley was struck, since her toes were burned, since the nurses filled her full of painkillers. That was the only explanation. She thought, Goddamn him, and then she cried.

  On day three, she opened and closed her father’s card again and again. She’d like a big bright studio. It might be fun to go fishing or skiing. Maybe just a week or two—not long, and then, as if her mother’s voice filled her head, she thought, It’s not too late. Not really. Not yet. Maybe when he wrote that note her dad had thought the same thing. Besides, Colin Atwell had been hanging around, asking how she was, when he might see her.

  When the doctor finally let Colin visit Becca, he said he hadn’t brought flowers because they die. Rather, he wanted to make a donation in her name to her favorite charity. “What’s your favorite charity?” He wanted to take her out to dinner when she felt better. If she was up to it. If she wanted to go. “Would you go out with me?”

  She laughed at him. “Yeah, sure.” She liked the idea of dating someone who’d made his fortune in condoms, even if they weren’t the brand of condom she preferred. There was something horrifically honest about this man. Something that appealed to her.

  Down the hall, Buckley had lost time. He’d lost Clementine, and he had only vague remembrances of a piggish man with a zucchini nose. He remembered the feel of his mother’s hand and the shine of her hair, and he remembered the New York Public Library and the Thin Man. No Martin Merriwether. He remembered how to rig a tackle and bait a hook, and his neurologist, Dr. Nicholas Cave, said there was no way of knowing what memories would return. He still remembered Galveston, Charlie Zuchowski, Flamehead, and the nine-page Barbi Benton spread.

  Buckley remembered Becca Burke.

  He did not remember being struck by lightning.

  He suffered third-degree burns on the bottoms of his feet and felt numbness in the right palm of his hand where the lightning made an exit wound. He knew that he would never feel the wet sand on the balls or soles of his feet the same way again, but he looked forward to sifting sand through his fingers. Like his mother, he loved the ocean.

  Paddy John sat at Buckley’s bedside. “You’ll be coming home soon,” he said. He thanked God he hadn’t lost Buckley. Buckley was his son.

  Buckley sipped Orange Crush through a straw. His dark hair was newly shorn, having been singed by the lightning, and he wore a hospital gown. He watched the TV mounted on the wall now and again—old episodes of Bewitched—and Becca sat at his waist on the bed. Her toes were still wrapped in gauze and her feet dangled.

  Buckley said, “You’re supposed to keep them elevated.”

  “I have a surprise for you.”

  Colin Atwell, grinning, with his sleeves rolled up, his shirt untucked, entered Buckley’s hospital room. He carried with him Fish, Number Fourteen. Becca clapped. “Do you love it?”

  Buckley reached out his ban daged hand, and Becca remembered that first night she and Buckley met, that rumpled man dripping rain, his arm outstretched, touching her painting.

  Colin carried the canvas closer to the bed, and Buckley fingered the white-tipped black waves with his scarred hand. He said, “I love it. I do.”

  Buckley saw his mother in there, in the paints. Not in the gaping, dying fish suffering and littered on the beach, as you might imagine. No. Buckley saw his mother, Abigail, in the glossy dark waters and white foam, and he saw her higher up in each painted brushstroke. Oh, how she’d loved and sustained him. He saw and felt her there in the cracked, forgiving sky.

  Endnotes to

  THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS

  I wrote this book for my mother—who did not survive.

  If anything I’ve written is inaccurate or disputable, I apologize. This book was written out of grief and love. My mother wanted to see me grow up and be a good man. I hope I didn’t disappoint.

  They were each, in some way, touched by lightning—connected and transformed by the heavens.

  In case you are wondering what became of them …

  Kevin Richfield flunked out of the University of Florida. Returning to Chapel Hill, he landed an entry-level position with a marketing conglomerate. By twenty-five, he had four children he couldn’t adequately support. He regularly suffered nightmares in which he, not Becca Burke, was struck by lightning.

  A few years after his tryst with Becca Burke, Christopher Lord, a.k.a. Apple Pie, fell hard for a student, Joy Parker, who was already married. Her husband, a bounty hunter, discovered the lovers together. He broke Apple Pie’s nose, his left thumb, his pointer finger, and three of his ribs. With Apple Pie’s eyes black and blue, his fingers bound, and his torso taped, his colleagues chuckled as he walked past, knowing that he’d picked the wrong student (or at least the wrong student’s husband), finally.

  Mrs. Apple Pie remained married to him, telling her girlfriends, “I feel sorry for him.” He was, they all agreed, “pathetic.”

  John Whitehouse died from a sudden and painful heart attack—leaving Winter a widow (of sorts) once again.

  Winter spent her last years knowing that she was right about everything and everyone else was wrong about everything. She attended the funerals of the Mont Blanc townsfolk she hardly knew, and when someone happened to ask, “What ever happened to your grandson?” she said, “I never had a grandson.”

  Mike Kingsley lost his fight for sole custody of Alice Kingsley. He and Carrie Drinkwater, civil to each other—for the sake of their daughter—shared custody. Carrie eventually remarried, this time to a pediatrician and vegetarian who played guitar for the band Pumpkin Seeds (folk and bluegrass). Alice Kingsley learned acoustic guitar.

  When Tide went to prison, Paddy John wrote to him.

  The afternoon Tide was released, Paddy John brought him home, saying “I don’t understand you” and slamming his fist into the refrigerator. Buckley urged him to calm down. Paddy John shouted at Tide: “You have to shoot up drugs? What the hell is wrong with you?” A tear rolled down his old cheek. “Goddamn it!”

  Paddy John stared at his son. Tide stared at the floor.

  With the sound of the ocean audible through the screened door, Paddy John walked over and took Tide’s forearms in his hands. “This is what we’ll do,” he said. “Stay here, just temporary, and get yourself together.” He patted Tide’s back. “You’ll get better. You got time.” Leaving the kitchen, he added, “You know I love you.” He turned to face his son. “You know it?”

  Buckley said, “Of course he knows.”

  Tide said, “I do now.”

  Richard Martin played basketball and worked in the laundry ro
om at a low-security federal prison in Dade County, Florida, where he served a thirty-year sentence. Occasionally, he wondered if Abigail Pitank had been telling the truth. The baby might have been his. He considered this notion in the same way one considers what to cook for dinner. It doesn’t really matter.

  Joan Holt died in 1998. Nearly all of Galveston attended her funeral, Paddy John and Buckley among them. Sissy was inconsolable for a time, but the world was a mess. No denying that. There was still work for her to do, battles to fight. Joan would want her to fight the good fight. Idealists are an uncommon breed.

  Mary Wickle Burke became Mary Wickle Burke McGowan in a sunny June ceremony on the sands of South Nags Head. Buckley was best man. Despite being barefoot, he still couldn’t feel the sand on the bottoms of his feet. At the ceremony, Sissy wore a see-through blouse, no bra. Becca was maid of honor. Aunt Claire, matron of honor. Surprisingly, there were fewer than ten people in attendance. Mary didn’t have many friends, and Paddy didn’t think to invite anyone but Sissy and Buckley.

  Paddy John McGowan never stopped loving Abigail Pitank. In Mary, he found a first mate, a seasoned partner to spend his days and nights with, to laugh at, and to laugh with. He loved her, but not the same way he’d loved Abigail.

  Rowan begged Patty-Cake for forgiveness, but she wouldn’t take him back. He continued to take photographs. He was learning to talk with his daughter. He was learning to listen. Patty-Cake took a Spanish lover, Paco, who was rightfully enamored of Patricia Heathrow. Amazingly, Paco—owner of a leftist bookstore, accomplished chef, and percussionist—equally charmed Patty. For the first time in her life, Patty desired a man as much as he desired her. It was unsteady ground, but it was so worth it!

  In Wanchese, Buckley returned to work. He felt the same as before, except now he dreamed of Abigail wearing a key lime skirt. Vivacious. Tremendous. Not bloody, not hurting. Beautiful. In his dreams, she said, “I knew you’d grow up to be a good man. You were always a good boy.” She took his hands in hers. He woke knowing she was with him. She’d always been with him. “It was never your fault,” she told him. On the beach, he sifted sand through his fingers.