More lightning—so close I heard it sizzle.
“Damn you!” she gritted through clenched teeth during the ensuing thunderclap. I didn’t hear those words, but I could read her lips. She closed her eyes a second, as if counting to ten, then looked at me again. “Do you have any children?”
I didn’t hesitate. “No.”
“Well, if you did, you’d understand when I say you know them. I know Timmy, and I know he’s there. And since you’ve never had a child, then you can’t understand what it’s like to lose one.” Her eyes were filling, her voice trembling. “How you’ll do anything—risk everything—to have them back, even for an instant. So don’t tell me I need medication. I need my little boy!”
“But I do understand,” I said softly, feeling my own pain grow, wanting to stop myself before I went further but sensing it was already too late. “I—”
I stopped as my skin burst to life with a tingling, crawling sensation, and my body became a burning beehive with all its panicked residents trying to flee at once through the top of my head. I had a flash of Kim with strands of her wet hair standing out from her head and undulating like live snakes, and then I was at ground zero at Hiroshima . . .
. . . an instant whiteout and then the staticky blizzard wanes, leaving me kneeling by the tree, with Kim sprawled prone before me, flaming pine needles floating around like lazy fireflies, and a man tumbling ever so slowly down the slope to my right. With a start I realize he’s me, but the whole scene is translucent—I can see through the tree trunk. Everything is pale, drained of color, almost as if etched in glass, except . . .
. . . except for the tiny figure standing far across the marsh, a blotch of bright spring color in this polar landscape. A little girl, her dark brown hair divided into two ponytails tied with bright green ribbon, and she’s wearing a yellow dress, her favorite yellow dress . . .
. . . it’s Beth . . . oh, Christ, it can only be Beth . . . but she’s so far away.
A desperate cry of longing leaps to my lips as I reach for her, but I can make no sound, and the world fades to black, my Beth with it . . .
I sat up groggy and confused, my right shoulder alive with pain. I looked around. Lightning still flashed, thunder still bellowed, rain still gushed in torrents, but somehow the whole world seemed changed. What had happened just now? Could that have been my little Beth? Really Beth?
No. Not possible. And yet . . .
Kim’s still white form caught my eye. She lay by the trunk. I tried to stand but my legs wouldn’t go for it, so I crawled to her. She was still breathing. Thank God. Then she moaned and moved her legs. I tried to lift her but my muscles were jelly. So I cradled her in my arms, shielding her as best I could from the rain, and waited for my strength to return, my mind filled with wonder at what I had seen.
Could I believe it had been real? Did I dare?
Still somewhat dazed, I sat on Kim’s motel bed, a towel around my waist, my clothes draped over the lampshades to dry. When she’d come to, we staggered to my car and I drove us here.
The room looked exactly as before, except a Hardy’s bag had replaced the Wendy’s. Kim emerged from the bathroom wearing a flowered sundress, drying her hair with a towel. She was bouncing back faster than I was—practice, maybe. She looked pale but elated. I knew she must have seen her boy again.
I felt numb.
“Oh, God,” she said and leaned closer. “Look at that burn!”
I glanced at the large blister atop my left shoulder. “It doesn’t hurt as much as before.”
“Oh, Joe, I’m so sorry you caught that flash too. I feel terrible.”
“Don’t. Not as if you didn’t warn me.”
“Still . . . let me get some of the cream they gave me for my heel. I’ll make you—”
“I saw someone,” I blurted.
She froze, staring at me, her eyes bright and wide. “Did you? Did you really? You saw Timmy? Didn’t I tell you!”
“It wasn’t your son.”
She frowned. “Then who?”
“Remember by the tree, just before we got hit, when you asked me if I had any children? I said no, because . . . because I don’t. At least not anymore. But I did.”
Kim stared, wide-eyed. “Did?”
“A beautiful, beautiful daughter, the most wonderful little girl in the world.”
“Oh, dear God! You too?”
My throat had thickened to the point where I could only nod.
She stumbled to the bed and sat next to me. The thin mattress sagged deeply under our combined weight.
“You’re sure it was her?”
Again I nodded.
“I didn’t see her. And you didn’t see Timmy?”
I shook my head, trying to remember. Finally I could speak.
“Only Beth.”
“How old was she?”
“Eight.”
“Timmy was only five. Was it . . .?” Her own throat seemed to clog as she placed her hand on my arm. “Did she have cancer too?”
“No.” The memory began to hammer against the walls of the cell where I’d bricked it up. “She was murdered. Right in front of me.” I held up my left arm to show her the seven-inch scar running up from the underside of my wrist. “This was all I got, but Beth died. And I couldn’t save her.”
Kim made a choking noise and I felt her fingers dig into my arm, her nails like claws.
“No!” Her voice was muffled because she’d jammed the damp towel over her mouth. “Oh-no, oh-no, oh-no! You poor . . . oh, God, how . . .?”
I heard a sound so full of pain it transfixed me for an instant until I realized it had come from me.
“No. I can’t. Please don’t ask. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
How could I talk about what I couldn’t even think about it? I knew if I freed those memories, even for a single moment, I’d never cage them again. They’d rampage through my being as they’d done before, devouring me alive from the inside.
I buried my face against Kim’s neck. She cradled me in her arms and rocked me like a baby.
“What about Timmy’s father?” I said, biting into my Egg McMuffin. “Does he know about all this?”
After clinging to Kim for I don’t know how long, I’d finally pulled myself together. We were hungry, but my clothes were still wet. So she took my car and made a breakfast run to Mickey D’s. I sat on the bed, Kim took the room’s one upholstered chair. The coffee was warming my insides, the caffeine pulling me partway out of my funk, but I was still well below sea level.
“He doesn’t know Timmy exists. Literally. We never married. He’s a good man, very bright, but I dropped him when I learned I was pregnant.”
“I don’t follow.”
“He’d have wanted to marry me, or have some part in my baby’s life. I didn’t want that.” My expression must have registered how offensive I found that, because she quickly explained. “You’ve got to understand how I was then: a super career woman who could do it all, wanted it all, and strictly on her own terms. I went through the pregnancy by myself, took maternity leave at the last possible moment, figuring I’d deliver the child—I knew he was a boy by the third month—and set him up with a nanny while I jumped right back into the race. I saw myself spending a sufficient amount of quality time with him as I molded him to be a mover and a shaker, just like his mother.” She shook her head. “What a jerk.”
“And after the delivery?” I’d guessed the answer.
She beamed. “When they put that little bundle into my arms, everything changed. He was a miracle, by far the finest thing I’d ever done in my life. Once I got him home, I couldn’t stop holding him. And when I would finally put him into his bassinet, I’d pull up a chair and sit there looking at him . . . I’d put my pinkie against his palm and his little fingers would close around it, almost like a reflex, and that’s how I’d stay, just sitting and staring, listening to him breathe as he held my finger.”
I felt my throat tighten. I remembered watch
ing Beth sleep when she was an infant, marveling at her pudgy cheeks, counting the tiny veins on the surfaces of her closed eyelids.
“You sound like a wonderful mother.”
“I was. That’s no brag. It’s just that it’s simply not my nature to do things halfway. Everything else in my life took a backseat to Timmy, I mean way back. It damn near killed me to end my maternity leave, but I arranged to do a lot of work from home. I wanted to be near him all the time.” She blinked a few times and sniffed. “I’m so glad I made the effort. Because he didn’t stay around very long.” She rubbed a hand across her face and looked at me with reddened eyes. “How long since Beth . . .?”
“Five years.” The longing welled up in me. “Sometimes I feel like I was talking to her just yesterday, other times it seems like she’s been gone forever.”
“But don’t you see?” Kim leaned forward. “She’s not gone. She’s still here.”
I shook my head. “I wish I could believe that.”
The lightning episode was becoming less and less real with each passing minute. Despite what I’d seen, I found myself increasingly reluctant to buy into this.
“But you saw her, didn’t you? You knew her. Isn’t seeing believing?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes believing is seeing.”
“But each of us saw our dead child. Can we both be crazy?”
“There’s something called shared delusion. I could be—”
“Damn it!” She catapulted from the chair. “I’m not going to let you do this!” She yanked my pants from atop the lampshade and threw them at my face. “You can’t take this from me! I won’t let you or anybody else tell me—”
I grabbed her wrist as she stormed past me. “Kim! I want to believe! Can’t you see there’s nothing in the world I want more? And that’s what worries me. I may want it too much.”
I pulled her into my arms and we stood there, clinging to each other in anguished silence. I could feel her hot breath on my bare shoulder. She lifted her face to me.
“Don’t fight it, Joe,” she said, her voice soft. “Go with it. Otherwise you’ll be denying yourself—”
I kissed her on the lips.
She drew back. I didn’t know where the impulse had come from, and it was a toss-up as to which of us was more surprised. We stared at each other for a few heartbeats, and then our lips were together again. We seemed to be trying to devour each other. She tugged at my towel, I pulled at her sun dress, she wore nothing beneath it, and we tumbled onto the unmade bed, skin to skin, rolling and climbing all over each other, frantic mouths and hands everywhere until we finally locked together, riding out a storm of our own making.
Afterward, we clung to each other under the sheet. I stroked her back, feeling guilty because I knew it had been better for me than her.
“Sorry that was so quick. I’m out of practice.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she murmured, kissing my shoulder. “Maybe it’s all the shocks I’ve taken, but orgasms seem to be few and far between for me these days. I’m just glad to have someone I can feel close to. You don’t know how lonely it’s been, keeping this to myself, unable to share it. It’s wonderful to be able to talk about it with someone who understands.”
“I wish I did understand. Why is this happening?”
“Maybe all those volts alter the nervous system, change the brain’s modes of perception.”
“But I’ve never heard of anything like this. Why don’t other lightning strike victims mention seeing a dead loved one?”
“Maybe they have seen them and never mentioned it. You’re the only one I’ve told. But maybe it has to be someone who died during a storm. Did Beth—?”
“No,” I said quickly, not allowing the scene to take shape in my mind. “Perfect weather.”
“Then maybe it has to do with the fact that they both died as children, and they’re still attached to their parents. They hadn’t let go of us in life yet, and maybe that carries over into death.”
“Almost sounds as if they’re waiting for us.”
“Maybe they are.”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop and Kim snuggled closer.
Later, when we went back to pick up Kim’s car, we walked up to where the lightning had struck. The top of the Nelson pine was split and charred. As we stood under its branches, I relived the moment, seeing Beth again, reaching for her . . .
“I wish she’d been closer.”
“Yes.” Kim turned to me. “Isn’t it frustrating? When I took my second hit, up in Orlando, Timmy was closer than he’d been in Texas, and I thought he might move closer with each succeeding hit. But it hasn’t worked that way. He stays about fifty yards away.”
“Really? Beth seemed at least twice that.” I pointed to the marshy field. “She was way over there.”
Kim pointed north. “Timmy was that way.”
I swiveled back and forth between where I’d seen Beth, and where Kim had seen Timmy, and an idea began to take shape.
“Which way were you facing when you saw Timmy in Texas?”
She closed her eyes. “Let me think . . . the sun always rose over the end of the dock, so I guess I was facing northeast.”
“Good.” I took her shoulders and rotated her until she faced east. “Now, show me where Timmy was in relation to the end of the dock when he appeared in Texas.”
She pointed north.
“I’ll be damned,” I said and trotted down the slope.
“Where’re you going?”
I reached into my car and plucked the compass from my dashboard. Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep I go out for long aimless drives and wind up God knows where. At those times it’s handy to know which direction you’re headed.
“All right,” I said when I returned. “This morning Timmy was that way—the compass says that’s a few degrees east of north. If you followed that line from here, it would run through New Jersey, wouldn’t it?”
She nodded, her brow furrowing. “Yes.”
“But in Texas—where in Texas?”
“White River Lake. West Texas.”
“Okay. You saw him in a northeast direction. Follow that line from West Texas and I’ll bet it takes you—”
“To Jersey!” She was squeezing my upper arm with both hands and jumping up and down like a little girl. “Oh, God! That’s where we lived! Timmy spent his whole life in Princeton!”
It’s also where he died, I thought.
“I think a trip to Princeton is in order, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes! Oh, God, yes!” Her voice cranked up to light speed. “Do you think that’s where he is? Do you think he’s still at the house? Oh, dear God! Why didn’t I think of that?” She settled down and looked at me. “And what about Beth? You saw her . . . where?”
“East-northeast,” I said. I didn’t need the compass to figure that.
“Where does that line go? Orlando? Kissimmee? Did you live around there?”
I shook my head. “No. We lived in Tampa.”
“But that’s the opposite direction. What’s east-northeast from here?”
I stared at the horizon. “Italy.”
A week later we were sitting in the uppermost part of Kim’s Princeton home waiting for an approaching storm to hit.
She had to have been earning big bucks as an investment banker to afford this place. A two-story Victorian—she said it was Second Empire style—with an octagonal tower set in the center of its mansard roof. One look at that tower and I knew it could be put to good use.
I found a Home Depot and bought four eight-foot sections of one-inch steel pipe, threaded at both ends, and three compatible couplers. I drilled a hole near the center of the tower roof and ran a length through; I coupled the second length to its lower end, and ran that through, and so on until Kim had a steel lightning target jutting twenty-odd feet above her tower.
The tower loft was unfurnished, so I’d carried up a couple of cushions from one of her sofas. We huddled side by sid
e on those. The lower end of the steel pipe sat in a large galvanized bucket of water a few feet in front of us—the bucket was to catch the rain that would certainly leak through my amateur caulking job at the roof line, the water to reduce the risk of fire.
I heard the first distant mutter of thunder and rubbed my hands together. Despite the intense dry heat up here, they felt cold and damp.
“Scared?” Kim said
“Terrified.”
My first brush with lightning had been an accident. I hadn’t known what was coming. Now I did. I was shaking inside.
Kim smiled and gave my arm a reassuring squeeze. “So was I, at first. Knowing I’m going to see Timmy helps, but still . . . it’s the uncertainty that does it: Is it or isn’t it going to hit?”
“How about I just say I don’t believe in lightning? That’ll make me feel better.”
She laughed. “Hey, whatever works.” She sidled closer. “But I think I know a better way to take your mind off your worries.”
She began kissing me, on my eyes, my cheeks, my neck, my lips. And I began undoing the buttons on her blouse. We made love on the cushions in that hot stuffy tower, and were glazed with sweat when we finished.
A flash lit one of the eight slim windows that surrounded us, followed by a deep rumble.
“Almost here,” I whispered.
Kim nodded absently. She seemed distant. I knew our lovemaking had once again ended too quickly for her, and I felt bad. Over the past week I’d tried everything I knew to bring her through, but kept running into a wall I could not breach.
“I wish—” I began but she placed a finger against my lips.
“I have to tell you something. About Timmy. About the day he died.”
I knew it had been tough on her coming back here. I’d seen his room—it lay directly below this little tower. Like so many parents who’ve lost a child, she’d kept it just as he’d left it, with toys on the counters and drawings on the wall. I would have done that with Beth’s room, but my marriage fell apart soon after her death and the house was sold. Another child occupied Beth’s room now.
“You don’t—”
“Shush. Let me speak. I’ve got to tell you this. I’ve got to tell someone before . . .”