The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors (21 page)

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:

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?”

Buckley flushed the toilet. He thought,
I’ll be getting out of here soon. Maybe I’ll go back to Galveston. Maybe I’ll go to New York with Clementine. You never know
.

Clementine spent Thanksgiving 1975 with Buckley and his “family” at the Holy Redeemer Church. She ate a few scraps of dark meat and some canned cranberry. After supper, she and Buckley sat in one of the back pews, listening to the reverend’s booming voice. He was trying to convince one of the parishioners to invest in some riverfront property. “A no-lose situation. Win! Win! You can’t let this opportunity pass you by. You’ll kick yourself.” He slugged his punch. “I’m not kidding you.”

Clementine laughed. Turning to Buckley, she said, “He’s so full of shit.”

The doors to the church stood open, the November air cool. It was dusk. Clementine looked stunning to Buckley in the waning light. Her hair was clean and pulled back in a ponytail. She had rubbed Vaseline on her lips and eyelids, and she glistened in the soft light.

Buckley said, “He’s selling Amway products now.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like aerosol cans and cleaners and empty bottles. He says he can make a million dollars. He’s got all these boxes of cleaning supplies in the shed. I don’t know, but I’ll tell you, there’s not going to be anybody left at Holy Redeemer if he keeps taking everybody’s money.”

“The good Lord will provide, Buck,” she mocked.

Buckley smiled. He loved Clementine. He worried about her.

Chuck had grown tired of her blow jobs. She was no longer worth his dwindling stash, and Scott had not come back. To her own father she was dead (sometimes people don’t think what their words can do), and Clementine was beat from trying to live in this world. She was putting on a good show today and congratulated herself for the clean hair and plaid skirt, the white tube socks Buckley had loaned her, which she folded down like bobby socks, and the baby blue polyester blouse she’d hand-washed and hung to dry. Genuinely, she could say, “I look pretty.”

When Buckley was in the bathroom, Clementine left the Holy Redeemer. She waved goodbye to Winter and Buckley’s stepfather, but they didn’t see. Church sucks. She hated thinking about God, this asshole who crucified his own son so that people like her, pathetic people, could have eternal life. What about this life? Face the facts: If you can’t live here and now with any level of enthusiasm, you might as well forget about some Nirvana afterlife. If you can’t get this one right, what makes you think you’ll do
better in the next place? She was never getting to New York. She was never getting Scott back. She would never be able to live without her drugs. The world was too much.

Crossing the parking lot, she passed the reverend’s unlocked pickup, spotted his hand-carved gun rack, the shotgun, the floor mat scattered with shells. Maybe the asshole upstairs was trying to tell her something. She’d borrow the gun. He’d get it back later. This was the same gun Abigail Pitank had worried would ruin her son.

Clementine carried the gun, barrel in hand, on down the road toward Drop Out City. A few cars passed, the drivers doing double takes, but no one stopped. A trucker honked his horn and waved. A station wagon passed, two children pressing their noses to the back window. Walking down that road, she made a deal with this shit god that if someone stopped, if someone came after her and said,
Don’t do it
, she wouldn’t do it. She’d keep living. She’d know it was a sign that the world wasn’t as cruel as she suspected.

When Buckley exited the bathroom, he expected to find Clementine beside the church ladies, eating pie. She wasn’t there. He thought she might’ve dozed off in one of the pews. No Clementine. “Have you seen Clementine?” he asked the reverend, who said, “Girls need space. Don’t smother her. Have some pie. Relax.” The reverend introduced Buckley to a circle of men. “This here’s my boy.” He put his arm around Buckley’s shoulder. “I was just telling Joey and Dan about that cleaner we’ve been using on the truck. It’s like magic, and you don’t ever run out. Isn’t that right, Buck?”

Buckley didn’t answer.

Winter handed the reverend a slice of pie on a Styrofoam plate.

The reverend said, “You are one fine cook, Ms. Pitank.” Introducing her, he said, “This here’s my mother-in-law. Best one in the world.” To Buckley, he said, “Go on. Tell these gentlemen how that
spray made the hubcaps shine. It’s safe to use in the kitchen too, so it’s an ideal gift for the wife.”

“It’s great,” Buckley said. “I have to go.”

The reverend said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I need to find Clementine.”

“She’s probably in the ladies’ room. Buck, tell Mr. Jones about how those windows shined.”

“They shined.”

“See, I told you, and no elbow grease either. Isn’t that right?”

Buckley didn’t answer. He trotted to the ladies’ room. Pushing the door open an inch, he called out Clementine’s name.

Mrs. Jones exited the bathroom.

“Is Clementine in there?”

“There are no young women in the bathroom. Only old women.” She laughed.

As Buckley left the church, the reverend calling after him to wait, the sun having set, Clementine Wistar climbed the clay hill to her lonely shack. Buckley drove to Barry’s Pool Palace where Chuck hung out, thinking he’d find Clementine there.

Clementine sat on her sleeping bag, her Drop Out City shack now clean. Her clothes folded. The darkness in the room like a blanket warming her, she took off her shoe and fumbled, her toe on the trigger of John Whitehouse’s shotgun, the barrel just below her nose. Ironically, as Buckley drove his stepfather’s truck toward the old dirt hill, as Buckley parked and climbed the hill, hopeful that Clementine could come and stay with him in his grandmother’s house, could maybe move in with them and get a job, Clementine had a second thought. She thought maybe she didn’t want to die.
Maybe I want to live. I’m only seventeen
. The gun went off just the same. Buckley heard the shot, the sound of the gun like thunder smothering him.

Before he reached the shack where light had seeped in during the warm Arkansas fall he’d spent with her, he knew that Clementine Wistar was dead. She was not recognizable when he found
her, legs washed clean for church and Thanksgiving dinner. He recognized her legs and glanced at the folded clothes.

When he carried her down the hill, blood soaking his shirt, he dropped her twice. He struggled to get her to the truck, saying again and again—as he’d done with his mother—“Don’t do this to me.” Struggling to put Clementine in the passenger’s seat, he dropped her one final time outside the truck, her limp arm knocking the door.

As he slammed the door, her head, what was left of it, slumped onto the metal glove compartment.

“Don’t die on me.” But he knew she was already dead.

He drove twenty miles to the emergency room, repeating his mantra, “Don’t do this to me.” The emergency room nurse, earning time and a half—it being a holiday—remembered Clementine: the girl who tried to kill herself with Seconal. She’d come to the clinic in Mont Blanc. This time there was a boy with her, an innocent-looking boy, who was not crying. He was numb now, finally. He had achieved what Clementine had so desired. He sat with a clipboard, paperwork, all blood-soaked, a dead girl in his lap.

Three years later in Farmville, Virginia, the nurse told Clementine’s story as Claire Burke’s stomach was pumped and she vomited. Claire Burke was saved from death, and a little girl, believing herself invisible and invincible, stood in the Farmville General Hospital corridor, overhearing the sad tale of one Clementine Wistar.

Buckley stood in the hospital emergency room as Clementine Wistar was taken from him, lifted onto a gurney, and rolled away. Never seen again. The nurse said, “I’m sorry.” Buckley didn’t hear her.

He drove home that Thanksgiving night to Winter and the reverend. The reverend was already asleep in his bed, while Winter, not looking at Buckley, not seeing the dried blood crisp on his collared shirt, said, “Your little friend’s nice, but next time ask before you take the truck. We had to get a ride with the Willises. You know I don’t like them.”

In February 1977, Rowan Burke met Patricia Heathrow. Jimmy Carter was president and Becca was seven years old. In another two months, she’d turn eight. In August, she’d be struck by lightning.

With barely a tap at the doorjamb, Patricia Heathrow bustled into Rowan’s cramped office in Venable Hall. She was brusque, reminding him on that February day of his wife, Mary, when they’d first met at UNC. She was beautiful, as Mary had been, as Mary still was, but this was a trait Rowan now rarely recognized in his wife.

Sitting across from Rowan, Patricia dug into her briefcase, muttering to herself about the ridiculous drive, the traffic on I-85, how they ought to double her salary. She plucked a handful of folders from the case and centered them on his desk, on top of the stack of tests he needed to grade.

Without introducing herself, she said, “Mr. Jones is interested in the formula
on paper
. Very interested, but we’ll need you to meet with the chemistry board.” She leaned back in the chair and, stretching her arms above her head, said, “Is there a good place to eat around here?”

He’d spoken to this woman on the phone. They’d arranged to meet at two o’clock. It was now twelve-fifty. He said, “You’re Patricia.” Extending his hand across the desk, he said, “Rowan Burke. It’s a pleasure.”

“Patty,” she said. “That’s not a contract.” She pointed to the stack of colored folders. “It’s a proposal. Something to consider and what we’ll expect in your presentation to the board.” Rising from the chair, she said, “I’m famished. Have you eaten?”

He had in fact eaten in the cafeteria across from Venable, but he lied. This was important.

He told her that they could walk, but she insisted on driving because of the cold. When they reached her car, she plucked a parking ticket from the windshield, then unlocked the Cadillac El Dorado and flung the blue ticket into the backseat, where it settled on a stack of multicolored folders—much like the stack left on his desk.

On that first meeting, Rowan thought mostly of the fortune he could make if Atkins and Thames bought his additive, if they hired him as a consultant. He thought about the cars he would buy, the yacht, the vacations, the life that he deserved. He thought about Dean Thompson, that pompous bore; about Mark Cusemeo, Texas hick. Rowan’s family was a founding family. The Burkes built the school, the town, the history that was packaged and sold in Carolina blue sweatshirts and flags, and he was passed up for tenure. He was snubbed by the lot of them. His mother had shaken her head at his marriage, at his career choice, at his untenured position, at his disregard for and lack of wealth. “What do you expect?” she’d said. “You were given every opportunity. All that you could want, and look what you did with it!” His mother was dead now for two years, yet he could see her pointing that bony finger—her manicured nails. She’d been right on every count.