The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors (23 page)

Patty shrugged and looked back at the newspaper in front of her. “Let’s not make it a big deal.” He’d bought her a gold locket for their anniversary, and he felt for the jewelry box in his pocket.

She said, “If you bought me something, I don’t want it. I like to pick things out myself.”

“Got it.” He left the locket in his pocket and felt stupid thinking that this affair between them required such gestures. He looked out the window again, at the dark expanse of parking lot and the tiny white cigarette butts dotting the paved landscape. Cigarette butts were now his bread and butter.

Against his better judgment, Rowan was falling hard for Patty, because she asked nothing of him.

Two months later, after Mary caught him in bed with Millie, he told Patty what happened.

“You’re screwing the babysitter in your wife’s bed!”

“Normally we meet in the garage.”

“That’s sick, Rowe. Something’s wrong with you.” They were in bed at the Madison Hotel, and Patty pulled the comforter up under her arms. “Is Mary going to divorce you?” She didn’t wait for him to respond. “Your wife’s either stupid or insane.” Patty fluffed her pillow and rolled onto her side, facing away from him. “Or both.”

“I’m sleeping in the garage.”

She rolled over and faced him. “Alone, I hope.”

He laughed.

“Does Rebecca know?”

“I don’t think so.”

They lay in silence that morning, Patty staring down at the bunched-up comforter tucked around Rowan’s waist. Rowan stared at her draped figure. He said, “Mary’s stupid and insane.”

“You like them young.”

“Are you jealous?” He kissed her forehead. “I like you, Patty-Cake.”

“I feel bad for your daughter.”

“Becca’s fine. Don’t talk about my kid.”

Despite his initial feelings about Patricia Heathrow—mainly that she was a bitch—he never perceived her as a threat to his family or his career. She seemed unmoved, unaffected by his affairs. Her only concern regarding his family (when she showed any concern at all) was for his daughter, the “odd” girl she saw haloed in snapshots. She occasionally joked, “You could sell Rebecca to the circus.” In her announcer’s voice she said, “Introducing … Lightning Girl.”

They were lovers and nothing more. In Rowan’s mind, they had an understanding. Without expectation, there would be no scene. No tears. No disappointment, but on one occasion, when they’d planned to meet at Poe’s Pub on a Saturday night before he drove back to Chapel Hill, this understanding was blurred for Rowan.

Patty didn’t show up.

She didn’t telephone the pub with an explanation, and he imagined the worst, the most dramatic tragedy. He sat at the bar until well past eleven, with the regulars crowding him in their coarse denim and greasy leather, the smoke from their cigarettes coating his new Ralph Lauren sweater, and he pictured Patty dead on a road somewhere. He saw her tumbling across the pavement like Jessica Lange in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
, her blond hair pink with blood, her lean arms and legs splayed across the double white lines. He was worried and told himself to stop imagining the worst. He phoned her six times that night, but because of their understanding, their no-strings-attached rule, he didn’t go to her apartment.

Patty called his hotel the next morning to say she’d had a bad headache. Maybe it was her tooth, but she hadn’t felt well. She was sorry.

He said, “I called you. Why didn’t you call Poe’s?”

“I had a headache.”

“I was worried.”

Again with the headache story.

Patty was no ditzy blonde. She never missed a beat. She was the epitome of common sense and organization. Headache or not, she would have had the wherewithal to phone, but he let it go. He’d see her again, but not for a while. He’d let things cool down. He’d spend some time with Becca. Maybe she’d like to come to Richmond with him: a father-daughter getaway. He’d ask.

For four years, Rowan didn’t know he was being played like the snare drum that Patty Heathrow had played in high school. He didn’t know that by the time she was in the eleventh grade, Patty rarely missed a beat or dropped a drumstick. Not her. Not his Patty-Cake. She won first place in regionals with her flam paradiddle-diddle and her perfect fifteen-stroke roll. She learned to play the snare in the sixth grade. She played thumbs down, and it took four years before she won her first competition. She
had practiced her sixteenth notes on a pillow to build up speed in her left hand before switching to wood, before touching the sticks to the drum. She was meticulous and disciplined. She knew how to play to win.
You don’t rush things
. Rowan didn’t even know she was a percussionist, let alone that he was being brilliantly played. Sitting in Barnacle Bob’s, watching Patty shake his wife’s hand, he was anxious to talk to Patty alone. Rowan knew this was no coincidence. He thought he knew what Patty was doing, what she was trying to do, but then he thought that he never knew what Patty-Cake was doing, and that made him want her all the more.

Buckley sits alone in the common area of Hawthorne Dormitory at the University of Arkansas, thinking about the past—his mother and Clementine, and sometimes the reverend and his grandmother. He remembers his mother, half the woman she had been, her skin fatless and sagging in yellowed pouches off her bones. Clementine giggling and drunk, calling him Scott. Clementine saying “Ah.” How she would “Ah” and “Ah” and “Ah,” and how she would say it softly, like she was in ecstasy and she was the happiest person he’d ever known, and how she would say “You need to relax. You’re just a kid, for Christ’s sake.” Buckley’s stepfather, the Reverend John Whitehouse, said, “No man nor woman should be loved more than the Lord.” Buckley’s mother’s breathing fainter, the skin swinging from her arms and drooping from her knees. How he loved his mother more than any lord. How he loved Clementine more than any lord. How the nitrates in Vienna sausages and pork rinds will make you mean, and he sees the summer squash nose of the reverend, puffy and bumpy and red, and he imagines he’s pulling that nose out of one of those big jars, his hand in the cold liquid, digging for it like it’s a red-hot sausage, and someone shouts, “Loser,” and he sits up on the tattered sofa and the past is gone. His dorm-mate Cliff plops down beside him.

“Have you got it?”

“What?”

“The questions for the exam. Shit, man! The questions. Are you jerking off?”

“Yeah, man, right here.” Buckley shuffles through the papers, which are damp and crinkled on the sofa.

“You made my fucking day.”

Buckley stole the questions from Dr. Cooper’s desk, mimeographed the two sheets, and replaced them within the same hour. Though he knows he’ll be expelled—if caught—he doesn’t care. To tell the truth, he’s got nothing to lose.

At three o’clock he waits in the dark, windowless corridor outside Dr. Jack’s office. His appointment’s for three-fifteen, but he’s not supposed to be late again. He’s been warned. He’s lucky he wasn’t expelled already, but there’s no pre ce dent for such behavior, nothing in the code of conduct about standing on top of a university dorm with a TV antenna during a thunderstorm. Buckley apologized. How many times? A hundred, and yet he’s here waiting for Dr. Jack to once again ask him about his classes, about his family, about the antenna and the rubber gloves and Martin Merriwether. Does he feel responsible for what happened to Martin? It’s implied that he should feel responsible.

Buckley rooms alone now. He’s still in the dormitory because that’s part of his scholarship, but he has a private room, and Tad, Martin Merriwether’s replacement, is always dropping by, poking his head in, forcing his way into Buckley’s corner of the world to make sure everything’s “on the up-and-up,” because ultimately, the new resident assistant explains, he’s responsible for the safety of the residents. Doesn’t Buckley understand these things? And Tad has no intention of putting his life at risk to help Buckley. According to Tad and the rest of them, Buckley is a problem. He’s to be watched.

Buckley explains to Dr. Jack, “It’s impossible to make someone get struck by lightning.” Sure, thinks Buckley, there are models and drawings and diagrams and pictures of lightning strikes,
but there’s never been a case where someone made lightning strike somebody. Or somebody else, he should say. Buckley imagines some poor sap with an electrical rod duct-taped to his torso on top of the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower and chuckles inwardly. It’s ludicrous. “It wasn’t my fault.”

“Of course not,” agrees Dr. Jack, who sits across from Buckley in a squeaking leather chair. There’s no sofa, just Dr. Jack and his junky old wooden desk, his steno note pad, and beyond that, a filthy window beaded and streaked with late-summer rain. “Not directly.”

Buckley tries to think of something else to say, because he’s always wanted to be a team player and he’s supposed to talk, to tell how he feels. That’s why he’s required to be here. To get it all out in the open. He retrieves a dusty paperback from his satchel. He licks his pointer finger and opens the book to page three. “According to Dr. Schwartz, only twenty percent of people struck by lightning actually die.” He holds the book
Lightning Statistics
open for Dr. Jack.

Dr. Jack takes the book.

Buckley says, “Dr. Schwartz has studied Florida storms for the past twenty-five years, and he writes that no one has systematically compiled statistics in terms of counting how many people have survived being struck. There are just case studies. See. Look.” Buckley points. “Right there.” He’s invading Dr. Jack’s space again. “Dr. Schwartz guesses, based on his own compiling of case studies, that almost eighty percent of people struck survive, like Martin, but then they have burns, paralysis, sometimes amnesia.” Buckley folds his arms across his chest and leans back in the chair. “Like Martin.”

Dr. Jack turns the page. “So?”

“Can I have that back, please?” Buckley reaches across Dr. Jack’s desk. “Please.”

“What does all this mean, Buckley?”

“It probably means that whether or not you survive depends on the power of the storm, and from what I can tell, most people
who die are struck in the head. They die from brain injury or heart attacks. But, let’s face it, Dr. Jack. It means that if you hear thunder, you ought to take cover.” Buckley snatches the dusty book and slips it in his backpack. “It means that the hair on your head and your arms will really stand up if you get hit or if you’re about to be hit.” Buckley brushes his own black arm hair with his fingers. He’s felt it.

“And Martin?”

“I told you. It was a mistake. I’m sorry.” He is, he truly is, but he didn’t know Martin was going to spy on him. He didn’t intend for the lightning to hit Martin. It was supposed to strike him—Buckley. All logic would dictate that the lightning hit Buckley, not Martin, and it might have, if Martin hadn’t fouled everything up by nosing into Buckley’s business and following him onto the roof.

“Why,” Dr. Jack begs, “would anyone want to get struck by lightning?”

Buckley has explained the experiment before—the reasoning behind it. After years of sitting in dusty libraries reading about lightning experiments, from Benjamin Franklin to C. T. R. Wilson to NASA, it was Buckley’s turn. He knew what he was doing, or he thought he knew what he was doing, and standing in dead brown fields during thunderstorms had accomplished nothing but sopping shirts that were still wet the next morning, when the reverend forced him to wear those same damp clothes to school. He wasn’t looking to die when he went up on the dormitory roof, but he was hoping and wishing and strategically prepared to get struck. After Martin was hit instead of him, when Buckley had first thought Martin was dead, he thought of the physicist Richmann, the ball lightning reportedly a fiery blue, the mark they found on the dead physicist’s forehead the size of a baseball, the two holes burned in one of his shoes. But Martin sustained finger burns. Charred fingertips. Martin wasn’t a very good resident assistant anyway. He was always smoking somebody’s reefer, hitting on somebody’s girlfriend. Buckley never liked him, but now he
envies him. Martin got what Buckley wants. He’s been struck by lightning and survived. Of course, Martin doesn’t remember being hit. He doesn’t know his own name. He has burned fingertips, singed blond hair, and amnesia.

Martin was the captain of the swim team, a finalist in the Arkansas state championships, king of the butterfly stroke, but now he can’t swim. It’s one of the things he’s forgotten how to do. It’s one of the reasons Buckley is in counseling twice a week. The other boys say Buckley is plain lucky, because if and when Martin Merriwether remembers who Buckley is, Martin will kill him.

Buckley has been to the hospital once as part of his penance and to discover what effects the lightning had on Martin.

The nurses whispered as he made his way down the newly painted avocado green corridor. Buckley thought it was an ugly color and the nurses thought he was an ugly boy. He knows what they thought. A nurse blocked his way into Martin’s room. “Are you family?” she asked.

Buckley didn’t respond. The idea that he and Martin Merriwether, so handsome and popular, could be related was preposterous.

People are leery of Buckley, and here he sits once again trying to convince his psychiatrist (Dr. Jack’s degree is in social work, but Buckley hasn’t bothered to read the degrees that hang crookedly on the wall) that he isn’t crazy. That someone has to find out the effects of lightning on those who survive. Somebody has to find out why some people die and others live. Why did Martin Merriwether live?