The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors (28 page)

After
The
Handbook
was complete and out there in the world, Buckley’s only escape from loneliness was work. He worked longer shifts. He worked doubles and triples. He stayed at Damici’s when he was off the clock. He sat at the bar, eavesdropping—anything to avoid being alone with his thoughts. Unfortunately or fortunately for Buckley, his new neighbor, Mia, didn’t abide sulking or introverts. She also wore heavy black boots, which she used to kick at his door. “Wake the fuck up!”

When she first moved in across the hall, she introduced herself, saying, “I’m punk rock.” Her boyfriend, wearing studs through his nose and eyebrow, said, “She’s hell on wheels.”

Buckley said, “She doesn’t have wheels.” He was trying to be funny.

“It’s an expression,” the boyfriend said.

Mia wore black eyeliner and black lipstick. Younger than Buckley, she said, “We’ll hang out together. We’ll be pals. When I’m out of beer, you share, and when you’re out of beer, I’ll share.”

He said, “I work a lot. I don’t drink.”

This morning, as she kicked his door repeatedly, a neighbor shouted, “What’s wrong with you? Stop that!”

Mia said, “Screw off.”

The neighbor said, “I’m calling the landlord,” and pulled her door shut.

Mia kept kicking. “You’re getting me in trouble,” she shouted
at Buckley’s door. “Don’t get me in trouble.” She kicked some more. Her boots were good for more than moshing. “Open up!”

Buckley said, “Go away.”

“No.” She kicked some more. “Open up!”

“Please stop.”

She kept kicking. She was relentless. Buckley was not. It required too much energy.

They sat side by side on Buckley’s sofa, Buckley’s hands between his knees, his eyes to the floor.

“I want you to come over Friday. I’m having a party.”

“I have to work.”

“Then after work. I won’t take no for an answer.”

“I’ll smell bad—like grease and garlic.”

“I don’t care. If you don’t come, I’m bringing the party to you.”

“I really just want to be left alone, Mia.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here. I revel in torture. See you Friday!”

It was after midnight on Friday when he got home, but he could hear the party still going strong. He showered. He didn’t want to go.
The New York Nighttime Music Hour
was on TV. He sat on his bed and stared at a nail in the wall, wondering why when he felt sad he couldn’t cry like a normal person. He showered and dressed.

Mia served cheap beer and vodka punch. There were potato chips and French onion dip—the kind you make with Lipton dried soup. The food reminded Buckley of the reverend. Maybe he should go back to Arkansas. He could rot away there. No, he’d rather rot in the Bronx. Mia got Buckley some punch. It smelled disgusting, but he drank it.

In the morning, he woke up bare-chested on Mia’s floor, his shirt tied around his head. He vaguely remembered dancing on Mia’s coffee table. (And he didn’t know how to dance!)

Mia was in a burgundy robe, her dark hair draped over one shoulder. “I told you you’d have fun.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened. You had some fun.”

“I don’t remember. Tell me.”

“Do you want coffee?”

“No.”

She sipped her coffee. “You want to hear the worst of it or the best of it?”

“Whichever.”

“You were cute. Everyone loved you. When Sheila said her uncle died last week, you started crying. You took off your shirt to dry your tears, and then you got up on the coffee table, got everyone’s attention, and told us how your mom got struck by lightning and how your girlfriend got shot in the face. That part was heartbreaking. And then everyone hugged you and said you should write songs because you had the bluest life they’d ever heard. You said, ‘I never cry. I’m crying!’ And then you tied your shirt around your waist and passed out.”

“This is why I don’t drink.”

Mia made a pouty face. “You were adorable.”

On Sunday, Mia took Buckley a paper plate piled with chocolate chip cookies. She said, “I didn’t make them or anything, but I think when you take them out of the blue wrapper and put them on a plate, they taste better. It’s the power of suggestion.”

Buckley poured two glasses of milk. He said, “I’m not a mean guy, but I’m cursed. Everyone I love dies. I don’t want to be friends with you or anyone. Just leave me alone.”

Mia dunked a cookie in a glass of milk, ignoring his short speech. “So I must tell you that on Friday night, after you told us all about your mom and stuff, and before you passed out, you and
my friend Sheila made out. She told you that you could call her Clementine. I think she totally likes you. Be-ware! She’s a psycho when it comes to men.”

“Please tell me that you’re joking.”

“Afraid not.”

“I’m never drinking again.”

I’m
not
an
idiot. I have feelings. I deserve to be treated with kindness and respect. “She’s upset about her grade.” Who does he think he is?

She called Apple Pie at home. She took the Valium and drank the beers and waited for him to rush over or call a fucking ambulance.

Instead, he said, “Don’t call here again.”

The next night, she was desperate and messy, complicated and bursting with apologies about why she kept calling. It was her dog. Whiskers died. He was gone. She didn’t get to say goodbye. Was that too pathetic? She’d had too much to drink. She’d never call him at home again.

She waited outside his office at ten o’clock. He always stopped there after his studio class. She’d win him back. She’d make him desperate for her. She’d done it before. She was special. She didn’t realize that there were four special students before her.

She leaned against the wall of the narrow hallway facing his office door. Maybe she should hide, but there was no place to hide. So she waited. She stared at a white knot of wood, like a bleach stain, just below the doorknob. It spiraled outward, growing darker and darker with each spiral, but the center was completely white. She was naked beneath a raincoat and army boots. She’d become desperate the way Aunt Claire had been for Tom—not fat like Aunt Claire, but the other extreme: waiflike, subsisting on cheap wine, Cheerios, and Fig Newtons.

Who the hell does he think he is? “Don’t call me”?! “Don’t call me”!?

She was drunk. She was mad. It was ten-thirty. She was sorry. She was seething. Floyd, the custodian, walked past, pretending not to see her. She fingered the white spot below the doorknob, hearing the
tick-tock
of the clock down the hall. She sat with her back against the door, her freckled white legs poking out from under her coat, bouncing the back of her head off the white spirals, pressing the rubber soles of her boots onto the opposite wall. At midnight, she kicked Apple Pie’s locked office door and hurt her big toe despite the heavy boots. She hopped on one foot in the tiny hallway, cursing his name.

Apple Pie had messed with the wrong woman. She wasn’t going to let him get away with it. He said he loved her. He said he only stayed with his wife “for the children.” He was a liar.
All men are liars
.

After Apple Pie, there were one-night stands. There was Chris-with-no-last-name. There was a Joseph, a Danny, and a Richard. They came and went. Some of them were artists or musicians, but a lot of them were professionals with nine-to-five jobs. In a few years, they’d be nine-to-six jobs, eventually eight-to-six. “If you want to be successful and if you want to get ahead, you work: longer and longer hours.”

It was 1989. AIDS and Republicans ran amok.

Lucy told Becca, “You’d better get tested.”

“I use protection.”

“It doesn’t matter. You should get tested.”

In Panama, U.S. troops captured General Manuel Noriega in Operation Just Cause. Richard Martin, Buckley’s biological father, hid in a Panama City hotel, while nearby, his longtime girlfriend, Gabriela, fled her house with another of Richard’s sons—Hector.
Her house, her whole village, caught fire and burned to the ground. She saw people fleeing. She saw people shot. She wondered if Richard would really take her and Hector to Miami. There was nothing left in Panama for them.

The CIA found Richard in his hotel room three days after U.S. forces took Noriega into custody. They also found six kilos of cocaine and
one
plane ticket to Miami. Richard had a penchant for ditching women.

He was flown to Miami first, next to Washington, D.C., where he was charged with treason and international drug trafficking. He claimed repeatedly that Noriega had set him up. Buckley’s biological father, Richard Martin, was a liar.

Gabriela met a U.S. Marine named Claiborne Dodge, who gave her his rations. She gave him a photograph of herself that she’d saved from the ashes.

In New York, Becca took Lucy’s advice. She got an HIV test. Two weeks later, she waited on a cushioned white table, kicking her feet back and forth, for the results. The nurse practitioner opened Becca’s folder and said, “This test is confidential. Do you understand?” She said a number of other things, all implying to Becca that there was bad news. She kept asking, “Do you understand?”

Becca thought she might vomit. “Yes, I understand.”

“The test is negative for HIV.”

Becca was fortunate, and she knew it.

The Belle Tara Gallery sits back from Washington Street.

In front of the building there’s a small seasonal garden. Today there are daffodils, hyacinths, and tulips. The smell of hyacinth sticks to his clothes. It’s 1987. Colin Atwell is eighteen. He didn’t go to college in the fall like the rest of them. Instead, he’s helping his dad build a tree house for their neighbor’s six-year-old son. He’s helping his dad clean out the basement. He’s reading Gardner’s
Art Through the Ages
and researching the children’s drawings saved from the Nazi camp and ghetto Terezín in Czechoslovakia. His heart breaks again and again at the hope the children kept.

To date, he’s written twenty-seven letters to his mother: it’s his own little bit of hope. He doesn’t know where she is, so he hasn’t sent one letter. He keeps them in his underwear drawer beside Becca Burke’s butterfly brooch. If he ever has a girlfriend, maybe he’ll give the brooch to her.

His dad is teaching him economics and civics by letting him play the stock market. He’s bought shares in Trojan, the condom maker. He’s taking a cooking class at the community college and teaching one of his cousins to skateboard.

Last year, after working at Big John’s Burger for four years, he hired a private detective to locate his mom. The dick, Nathan Lantree, part-time cabbie, part-time private eye, said, “I tried. I just can’t find her.” Still, he charged Colin for expenses.

Colin has no future plans, only immediate ones: He’s going to
see Rowan Burke’s photographs at the gallery. There’s also an artist, Kate Mammet, he wants to see. He’s getting a haircut. He’s going to take a walk around the university. He’s going to read “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas for the fourteenth time in two days—to learn it by heart—a practice he has. On his way into Belle Tara, he recites, “Though wise men at their end know dark is right/Because their words had forked no lightning they/Do not go gentle into that good night.” He thinks about the children in Terezín and how they raged through their art.
Do not go gentle. Never
.