The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors (18 page)

Mary said, “I need a stronger drink.” Like the topsy-turvy stone in Becca’s gut, Mary had her stone, but it was a much larger, jagged rock, tipped with scotch and Valium to dull the points.

Becca studied the black-and-white photos lining the wall. Along with the lifesaver pictures, there was one of Orville and Wilbur Wright posing in front of their Kitty Hawk barracks. She was desperate for home. The rock in her gut flipped. She ran for the bathrooms in the corner of Barnacle Bob’s, past the pinball machine Bounty Hunter, with its orange and blue lights spelling
GAME OVER.
The bathroom was marked by a pink and white anchor. She tried the doorknob but it was locked. She knocked. A voice from within said, “Hold your horses.”

I can’t
, thought Becca, running into the men’s room. She vomited with her hands on the rim of the toilet, her right palm in a spot of urine.

She felt better. Washing up with the powdered soap from the
dispenser, reminding herself that everything was going to be okay, a large man with muttonchop sideburns and a hairy gut hanging over his belt pushed open the door. Rather than saying “Excuse me,” and stepping out, he said, “It says ‘Gents’ Head,’ girlie.”

Girlie? You’ve got to be kidding
. “Sorry.” She hadn’t flushed yet.

He looked at the toilet and back at Becca. “You threw up? You had to throw up in here?”

“There was someone in the other bathroom.”

“You didn’t flush.”

“And now I’m not going to.”
Fuck you!
She’d had her palm on the rim of a man’s toilet seat. Let him flush her vomit.

Becca went to the bar, grabbed her father’s soft hand, and said, “Let’s go. I don’t feel good.”

He pulled his hand free. “I need to talk business with Patty.” He tossed his head back, a raw oyster sliding from its gray marble half shell into his mouth, reminding Becca of her mother when she took bourbon shots.

Patty smiled at Becca. “Rowe, you should go if Rebecca doesn’t feel well.”

Rowe?

“Hi, I’m Virginia.” Patty’s sister was an older, shorter Patty. “Are you having a good vacation?”

“I got sunburned.” Becca tugged her dad’s hand.

“All right, all right,” he said. “In a minute. Go tell your mom we’re leaving.”

Becca went back to their table. Paddy John said, “Your mom’s not feeling so great.”

“Me either.”

“I feel fine,” Mary said. “Becca and I have no secrets. I was just telling Paddy John here that I’d make him a wager. I bet your dad and that woman are having sex, and I bet I can get one of them to confess.”

“Mom, please don’t.”

“Don’t what? What are you afraid I’ll do?
I’m
not having sex
with anybody.” She tapped her chest with two fingers for emphasis. “Not me.” Mary rose from her stool and headed toward the bar. Becca followed, urging, “Mom, don’t. We’re leaving. Dad said we’re leaving. I got sick in the bathroom. I’m sick. I think it’s the sunburn. Let’s wait for Dad to finish talking and we’ll go.”

“Is that what they call it? ‘Talking’? I think it’s a little more than that.”

Mary tapped Rowan on the shoulder but directed her question at Patty. “Are you having sex with my husband?” She tossed back a bourbon shot.

Patricia looked to her sister first and then to Rowan. She cleared her throat as if she hadn’t understood Mary’s question, as if Mary had made some mistake. “Excuse me?”

“You’re not the first, so please don’t play dumb with me.” The bar was silent except for the splunks and sirens of the Bounty Hunter pinball machine.

Rowan said, “We’re not doing this here.”

“Why not? You do it in the garage. You do it in our bed.”

Tide, approaching Becca from behind, put his hand on her shoulder. “Do you want to get out of here?” Becca didn’t answer.

Mary said, “Own up. Are you having sex with my husband?”

“Don’t do this.” Rowan grabbed Mary’s wrist. “Stop.”

“Stop, Mom.”

“That’s good, Becca. Take your dad’s side.”

Tide said, “We should get out of here.”

Mary yanked her wrist loose. “I want another shot.” The bartender was drying glasses, pretending not to listen.

“I need another Jim Beam.”

The bartender said, “I’m not serving you.”

Paddy John shouted from the table where he still sat, “She’s a friend of mine, and she needs that drink.”

The bartender poured Mary’s shot.

“We’re leaving,” said Rowan. “I’m sorry, Patty. I’m very sorry.”

“I’m not going anywhere and neither is my daughter.”

“We’re leaving, Mary. Get your purse.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Someone in the bar clapped. Another person laughed.

A restrained look of anger on his face, Rowan extended his hand to Paddy John. “I wish I could say it was a pleasure.”

“Our score is settled.” Paddy John patted his front shirt pocket, where Rowan’s check was folded. The two men shook hands.

“We’ll be leaving now.”

On his way to the door, Rowan took Becca’s hand. He said, “I’m sorry about this, Piddle. Everything’s going to be okay.” She couldn’t remember the last time he’d called her Piddle. She felt sick. Powerless. Mary grabbed on to Becca’s other hand.

Even after this huge scene, they were leaving together as a family, Becca thought. Then her mother pulled Becca toward the bar. “She’s not going anywhere with you.”

Patty and Virginia placed a twenty on the bar. “Excuse us.” They left Barnacle Bob’s before the Burkes. Patricia Heathrow did not suffer indignities.

Rowan held Becca’s left hand, Mary her right. Rowan pulled Becca toward the door. He said, “How can you do this, Mary?”

“She’s
my
daughter.”

Becca was being pulled apart.

“You’re making a fool of yourself.”

Mary reached for Becca’s waist. “Come on, honey.”

Rowan said, “She’s not going anywhere with you. You’re drunk.”

Grandma Edna and Bo came to see me
.

“You screwed the babysitter!”

Rowan let go of Becca’s hand. He said, “We’re leaving.”

I killed Bo. I didn’t mean it
.

Mary let go of Becca’s hand. “Let’s go then.”

The miracle fish in Becca’s hand was gone. There was no such thing as a miracle fish. Somewhere in the room a stool overturned, a glass shattered, and someone called, “Julianna, I need a
stiff drink. I can’t listen to this shit.” Someone else laughed. Becca saw her miracle fish swarming with flies. She imagined the dead fish rotting in her hands.

Rowan left for Chapel Hill that night. Becca begged him, “Please take me with you.”

He said no.

Becca had no idea that her mother wanted to beg the same thing of Rowan. As much as Becca wanted a caretaker, so did Mary. Age is but a number.

That same night in Chapel Hill, Colin Atwell took Becca’s purple butterfly brooch from his sock drawer and studied each of the shimmering amethysts, snug in their platinum settings. He counted twenty-eight. Colin’s dad called from their den, “Get in here! The game’s on.” Colin switched off his bedroom light. “Coming, Dad.” Colin was always a good boy: the kind of boy Abigail Pitank Whitehouse had hoped Buckley R. Pitank would be.

In her beach house bedroom, Becca pulled the window shut. Even so, the ocean waves made themselves heard.

Pivotal events, occurrences that should be embedded, second by second, in your memory, are too immediate for reflection. Even years later, the seconds mix together like batter, the ingredients indistinguishable.

Mary lights a cigarette at the kitchen table. “He’s moving in with that Patty person. He’s putting his suitcase in the car.”

There’s the puffing on a green-ringed cigarette, the shuffle of slippered feet beneath the table, the cup at her mother’s lips, the little dribble of coffee running down the side of the cup, the exhalation
of smoke, Becca’s hands on her hips, her bare feet, one foot crossing the other to scratch at a mosquito bite on her left calf; her voice, cracked and insistent: “It’s Sunday,” because she doesn’t know what else to say. “It’s Sunday,” thinking,
Sunday is the day Dad and I go to breakfast at Sutton’s. Today’s Sunday. He would’ve said something. He wouldn’t just leave
.

The screen door slams shut behind Becca. She manages, “It’s Sunday,” and he smiles. He shuts the Austin Healey’s trunk. Certainly he couldn’t have packed much in there. Certainly he’s not leaving for good, and he meets her in the middle of the driveway halfway between the side door and his escape. He wipes his hands down the front of his khakis, smiling like everything’s okay. Becca’s hands are clasped together under her chin; unconsciously her fingers curl around one another like when she made the church with all the people and the steeple when she was very little. She feels small, not small how she felt on the beach with the ocean and sky; not small like she was part of something great and beautiful, but small insignificant, like an ant or slug squashed, unnoticed.

Becca thinks this is like acting, like playing a part in an after-school special where some girl, not her, is abandoned, and if someone were to play Becca right now in a movie, she’d pick young Hayley Mills because she always liked
The Parent Trap
. Needless to say, Cary Grant would play her dad.

Her father touches her arm. “Look,” he says. “I need to leave. I can’t stay here right now.”

“Where are you going? Are you coming back?”

He shakes his head no.

“Were you going to say goodbye?”

“Of course.”

She scratches at the bundle of curls at her neck. “Don’t go.”

“I’ll see you later this week. Okay?”

It’s not okay. She’s already said “Don’t go.” He gets in the car, gripping the steering wheel, looking in the rearview mirror at his
tan face, at that “fine jaw” he told Becca he got from his father, who got it from his father, who got it from his father—a Burke blessing—and adjusts his baseball cap. His arm hangs over the driver’s door, the whiter side exposed, waxlike in the sun.

“I love you,” he says.

Becca is not Hayley Mills and he is not Cary Grant. This is real. Unlike the Pea Island beach day and the magic fish, the bad feeling of this day remains. Details fade. For a couple years, she’ll remember her mother’s slippers brushing the kitchen tile. She’ll remember the Carolina blue of her father’s baseball cap. The rest is batter. It’s all mixed up, and none of it tastes good.

His mother was dead. His life changed. The Mont Blanc landscape, the red clay roads, the Holy Redeemer Church, Grandma Winter, and the Reverend Whitehouse were the same. No one seemed to notice that he’d been away.

“What was she thinking, running off like that?” Winter asked.

When Buckley tried to answer, she stopped him. It was a rhetorical question. Winter and John Whitehouse suggested that Abigail’s death was God’s judgment.

After all, she’d had an illegitimate child. She’d run away, abandoning her husband and mother.

Winter complained, “I buried a husband. Now my only daughter is dead. God judges me too.” Trying to make sense of things for Buckley, she said, “Your mother sometimes lived wild and wouldn’t listen. It isn’t fair for you to be a victim all your life.” Then she sobbed. Was she really sad? he wondered. Buckley didn’t understand Winter Pitank, and he didn’t have the energy to try.

The reverend took Buckley to the barber on Main Street to remedy the boy’s weird hippie look. He bought Buckley new Wrangler jeans at the Kmart in Sherrill City. The boys at school no longer said or did mean things to Buckley. Instead, they ignored him.

• • •

In 1975, Buckley met Clementine Wistar, quaalude addict and resident of Drop Out City, Arkansas (a wannabe commune in Mont Blanc).

Clementine ran through a field of crackling sun-snapped briars toward Drop Out City’s perimeter, a rusty barbed-wire fence that bordered Buckley’s backyard.

There, Winter hung laundry out to dry, and Buckley, sixteen and red-faced, a morose young man, sat on the back steps of his cinder-block house, drawing a peace symbol in the dirt with a twig. It was August and hot.

Clementine wore a man’s striped dress shirt and a pair of green army boots. She waved from the barbed wire to Buckley, her hair dark and slick, even from that distance, just like his mother’s.

“Where you going?” Winter asked.

“No place.” Buckley walked toward the barbed wire that separated Winter’s property from the hippies in Drop Out City, formerly Moss’s Ranch and Stables. He carried his drawing twig and pretended to amble, all the time heading straight for Clementine.
Such a pretty girl
, he thought.
She could be a Barbi Benton if she weren’t stick thin, if she weren’t a drug addict
. He knew what she was. He knew she was weak. He wanted to know her weakness better. He wanted to save her, but there are some people who can’t be saved. Who can’t be lifted up and made into the people they were never born to be anyway. Buckley didn’t know these things. He saw possibility in her dark eyes, and even on this day, when Buckley saw Clementine up close—her eyelids droopy, her face pale, spotted here and there with stray freckles like a blind man had dotted a white canvas—when she hid her face behind a freckled hand, the skin yellowed around her mouth, he still believed he could save her. He said, “How’s it going?”

Clementine’s lips were dull and cracked, like the clay under his feet.