The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors (17 page)

“I mean it,” Mary said. “I envy you. It’s funny, but we all want better than what we had for ourselves. I don’t know how that sounds.” She cut the Volvo’s headlights. Mary rested her forehead in her hand. Moths flitted around the driveway’s light. Looking up, she asked, “Am I a good mom?”

It was the question Becca never wanted to hear, let alone answer. She could say,
No! To use Dad’s word, you’re a sot, and you spend too much time feeling sorry for yourself
, but instead, skirting the question, she said, “I love you.”

“I love you too, sweetheart.” They climbed the side steps to the cottage’s back porch.

Rowan met them on the porch. He peeked into the bag. “Mint chocolate chip. My favorite.”

Becca said, “You can’t have any, Dad. Mom is going to eat the whole half gallon. It’s some kind of world record.”

“Good luck with that, Mary.”

Mary said, “Wait until you see what I got.” Setting her bags on the pine table, she pulled the current issue of
Yachting Today
from her grocery bag. “Pretty good, huh? I was thinking about you.”

Rowan massaged his temples. “That was good of you, Mare, but”—he raised the current issue from his chair on the deck—“it came before we left.”

“I thought you said it hadn’t come.”

“Well, it hadn’t, but then it did. It came yesterday.”

Great!

The ideal American family, they played Monopoly. Rowan owned Boardwalk and Park Place, and toward the end of the game, Mary, for no reason, moved his car to the jail square. He told her, “You know I have a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

She shrugged. Neither he nor Becca said anything about Mary’s smelly cocktails. Rowan sipped a single glass of white wine and they ate a bowl of potato chips in lieu of dinner. Becca drank her Coke through a straw, and watching her parents smiling at each other, she believed that the ocean was a magical place. She paid her father her last two fifty-dollar bills. “What about a loan?”

“Nothing doing.” He played to win.

That night, Becca opened the bedroom window. With Whiskers curled at her waist, she listened to the waves sweep the shore. Before drifting to sleep, she thought that if any place in the world could bring her parents back together, this place could.

Later, she dreamed she took flight from the windowsill. Her arms were pelican’s wings and she raised them slowly in the gusting wind. She glided out over the ocean until the soft light from the house disappeared. When the red sun crested the waves, she
flew back. Whiskers was curled up on her bed, his head on her pillow. She hovered just outside. Someone had closed the screen.
Let me in
. She awoke in a sweat.

The next morning, they drove down Route 12. Mary’s left hand rested on Rowan’s thigh. Rowan pulled off on Pea Island. “I like this,” he said. Theirs was the only car.

Mary and Becca climbed the dune. The beach was deserted.
Magnificent
.

Mary yelled to Rowan, “This is the spot.”

As he unloaded the car, Becca ran toward the ocean, her flipflops spraying hot sand onto the backs of her calves. Mary trailed.

Mary said, “The ocean is about youth, hatchlings and minnows, and it’s about age, wounded seagulls, and dead fish.”

Catching up, weighted with beach blankets and picnic baskets, Rowan said, “What the hell’s gotten into you?”

“I was thinking about my mom. Once a year she brought me and Claire to this awful clapboard house five blocks from the beach. The plaster fell in patches from the ceiling. You had to jiggle the toilet handle and use the plunger if you went number two. The place had one bedroom, no air conditioning, and a screened porch riddled with holes. We’d get back to Prospect sunburned and covered in mosquito bites.”

Becca dropped the beach bag and ran for the water.

Mary continued: “Funny. It was the time of my life. Dad never came. It was just us girls, and we always got along.” Nostalgic, Mary spread her towel on the sand.

Rowan was no longer listening.

Meanwhile, Becca plunged through the breaking waves, shrieking as the water reached her waist. She knew her dad would say, “Dive under,” and she did, emerging revitalized and no longer cold. She swam back and forth, waiting for her dad’s diving entrance. Her mother never swam with them; instead, she waded just past where the waves broke. “Come on, Mom,” Becca would plead.

“No chance in hell.”

Today, Rowan dove into the water. Humming the theme song to
Jaws
, he chased Becca until she couldn’t touch, grabbing her around the waist and tossing her into the air. She screamed.

Her dad said, “What if we never grow up?”

“What?” He didn’t usually talk imaginatively.

“We’ll never get old. Just like Peter Pan.”

“I’m with you.”

He bolstered her up, his hands forming a stirrup, tossing her into the waves where she couldn’t touch. Again, he hummed the
Jaws
theme song. Becca swam for the shore. The harder she swam, the further she drifted from shore. She kicked and paddled, shouting, “Help!” There was no lifeguard here. The waves were big. She thought about sharks and octopi. “Help!” Where had her father gone?

Peering over the lapping waves, unable to touch and treading water, she saw her mother on shore waving, her face concerned. She saw her father there too, turning to see Becca drifting further out to sea. Becca wondered if they’d fight long enough for her to drown. She flailed her arms, and knowing how to float, lay back, eyes shut, thinking that if a shark ate her, a shark ate her. It’s the fear of the thing—whatever the thing might be—that kills you. Becca could hardly see the sand over the lapping waves.

Lickety-split, her mother was past the breaking waves, paddling toward Becca. She secured one arm across Becca’s chest and one under her armpit. “You’re fine. Relax, and you’ll be able to touch in no time.” Her mother paddled and kicked. Becca floated. Her panicked breathing subsided. She said, “I’m scared.”

“This isn’t a big deal. It’s the undertow. Next time, if you feel the waves pulling you out, swim parallel to the shore.”

It’s no big deal. It’s just my life
.

Around two o’clock, they ate their sandwiches. Miracle Whip again.

After his sandwich, Rowan slept. Mary read
People
magazine. Becca walked. She wasn’t lonely like she thought she’d be without Carrie, just in awe of her surroundings. A salty foam on her calves, she watched as sanderlings diagonally chased the surf up and back. Becca thought about her parents, about today—how there might never be a better day. When she got back to Chapel Hill, using the Woolworth acrylics Grandma Edna had sent, she’d paint this scene—at least the memory of this scene. She’d keep the ocean, sand, and sky, and when fall arrived, and the school days with it, Becca would sit behind a desk, wishing she were elsewhere, and she’d have this day. She’d come back here in her mind. The pelicans skimmed the waves. The gulls fished the surf. Becca walked until her parents disappeared from view. In the distance, she spotted something shiny.

A blue fish. Not exactly blue: its scales a smattering of silver, green, and violet. The fish’s gills puffed and its mouth, dime-sized, swelled and deflated in Becca’s shadow. The fish was thirty feet from the tide, but it was alive. Without thinking, Becca lifted the fish with both hands, expecting it to flop about, but it was motionless.

She carried it across the sand, through the surf, to where she was waist-deep in the water. A school of tinny minnows swam in her path, or rather she in theirs, a few darting between her thighs. She lowered her fish into the calm green water. As if deciding what to do, where to go, her fish didn’t move. She waited, and then he swam away.

For the rest of her life, Becca would try over and over to paint that fish, and she would fail. She didn’t remember every detail of that Pea Island beach day as she had promised herself she would, because the details of that cloudless day were overshadowed by darker days, like the day the wind shifted and the flies came and they bit at the tourists’ ankles and scores of puffer fish inexplicably washed ashore, and the flies buzzed around the rotting fish, and Becca threw up. She remembered
thinking
she had saved a
fish. She remembered her mother’s hand on her father’s thigh, the salt dried on her face and back, her father lifting her into the air, and the sea spray speckling her cheeks, but she couldn’t keep those memories close. She couldn’t paint
that
fish. She couldn’t gather that much hope or that much beauty because it hurt too much. Besides, there would be other fish to paint and other things to feel. At twelve years old, Becca had the rest of her life to feel.

The westerly wind blew the black biting flies from the Pamlico Sound across the swampy brush and clapboard houses, across the main highway and the beach road, over the dunes and sea oats to the beach. Along with the black flies that nibble on your ankles and calves, the westerly wind brought Patricia from Chapel Hill, Patty with two t’s, not two d’s. Patty who wrote a note to Rowan four years ago, a note that seemed insignificant, but to Becca and her mom, intuitively not. A note that was first in Becca’s mother’s palm, next in Becca’s mother’s jewelry box, and then stolen and stashed for four years in Becca’s vanity drawer.

It was no coincidence that Patricia Heathrow—Patty—was in Barnacle Bob’s.

Barnacle Bob’s was a dark hole-in-the-wall with exposed oak beams and row upon row of black-and-white photographs of the old lifesavers—the Midgett family and other early inhabitants, who’d rowed wooden lifeboats through surf and stormy sea to rescue distressed seamen, from fishermen to sailors.

Rowan and Mary sat at a table with their captain-for-hire, Paddy John McGowan. They’d been on the water all day. Becca, due to sunburn, had remained behind at Barnacle Bob’s with Paddy John’s son—who was supposed to entertain her. He was fourteen, with acne and orange-crusted braces. Supposedly teaching her to shoot pool—when he wasn’t very skilled himself—the boy bragged that he knew how to drive, that he’d smoked marijuana, that he
came and went as he pleased, and Becca listened passively, checking the clock on the wall, wanting the day to end. Her shoulders itched; her face flushed from the sunburn. As soon as her parents returned from their sea adventure, Becca ditched the boy supposedly named Tide.
What kind of name is that?
She sat with her parents and their salty captain, Paddy John. He was a storyteller: “I was out in this squall. The water was up to my knees, and Harry was on deck trying to steer, but there was no use. The best we could hope for was staying afloat. We had no idea where we’d end up, and didn’t much care. At that point, it was all about staying alive.”

“Where did you end up?” Mary asked.

“When all was said and done, twenty-three miles off the coast of St. Augustine.”

Mary was mesmerized. Becca sat with her chin in her palms, sometimes scratching at her shoulders. “What’s a bilge pump?”

Rowan, suddenly distracted, said, “Excuse me. I’ll be right back.”

When he returned to their table, Patricia Heathrow was with him. She was tall and thin with bright blond hair, a pixie cut, and Becca noticed that her arms were too long, as were her legs, which were bronzed. She wore heeled sandals despite her height, and when she shook Mary’s hand and said, “Hi. I’m Patricia Heathrow. I work with Rowan,” Becca knew that this was Patty. She also knew that her mother knew. The Wickle women were remarkably savvy when it came to such matters.

Patty said, “What a coincidence!”

Mary said, “It certainly is.”

“It’s so nice to finally meet you.”

“You as well. Can you sit?” Mary asked. She had a few questions for Patricia.

“My sister’s at the bar, but it was nice meeting you. Small world.”

“Same here.” Mary gritted her teeth.

Paddy John said, “Pretty girl,” and watched her walk away.

Rowan said, “I’ll be right back,” following Patty to the bar.

Paddy John said, “She’s not nearly as pretty as you,” reaching out and touching Mary’s hand, which trembled ever so slightly under his.

Mary sat shoulder to shoulder with Paddy John, thinking,
This is the kind of man I was supposed to marry, but I wanted someone better. I wanted something better—the big house, the two point five children, the social clubs, the name. I didn’t want a farm boy or a sailor or a blue-collar nobody
.

Paddy John said, “When I was in Galveston down on the docks, looking for some action, I see this fellow passed out in his undershorts. This little girl says to me, ‘Don’t worry,’ but I worried. These women had taken everything the guy had. Not just his money but his goddamn boots. I knew I didn’t want to drink there, and she says, ‘Come on and have a drink. The first one’s on the house.’”

“Oh my god,” Mary said. She wondered if Paddy John cheated on his wife. She didn’t even know if he had a wife. She could ask if he was married, but that might sound like a pickup line. No, of course it wouldn’t. She was married.

“You wouldn’t believe some of them ports. The shit that went on, that probably still goes on.” He thought of Trina’s whorehouse, his ex-wife there. Then of Abigail. He said, “I fell in love in Galveston.”

“I’ve never been to Galveston.” Mary wondered how Rowan could do this to her, how he could have one of his whores meet them on vacation. Maybe it wasn’t planned. She’d almost believed there wasn’t anyone else. Not right now, anyway. Not for some time. She’d been a laughingstock for so long.
Maybe he’s over there right now telling her to leave
.

Paddy John slid the saltshaker toward Mary. “You should go to Galveston.” Drumming his fingers on the table, he asked, “Your husband always work on vacation?”

“He works a lot.”

“That’s a shame. If I had a wife looked like you and enough money to buy that seafaring beauty, I’d quit my day job.”

“Thank you.” She knew that she’d been beautiful at one time in her life. That’s how she’d caught Rowan in the first place, but lately she’d been feeling the difference between thirty-four and Patty’s twenty-something. Feeling plain tired. Why hadn’t her stomach ever lost its pooch after Becca? Why wasn’t she born as tall as Patty Heathrow, as blond, as slim? She was Mary Wickle Burke. Mary the redhead. Rowan’s wife. Former PTA member. Former Garden Club board member. Current cookie baker. She remembered part of a funny poem she wrote in college when she thought she was someone else:
I am not a woman. I am not a baby maker, I am not sweet smiles fetching his coffee and paper
. Something something.
I am not a cookie baker, an ordered homemaker
. Something something. She forgot. She
was
a cookie baker. She
was
a baby maker. She was a former member of the Historic Preservation Society. She was a laughingstock. A drunk. A former snob. She was Rowan Burke’s wife, and he was never going to stop cheating.