The Truth About Love and Lightning

by Susan McBride

  Two

  “It’s not possible. It can’t be.”

  Despite what appeared to be the cold, hard facts, Abigail Brink simply refused to believe that she was pregnant.

  Even the queasiness that gripped her sporadically from dawn to dusk, the bloated belly, the pressing need to frequently relieve herself, and the two missed periods weren’t enough to completely convince her. These were all things caused by stress and she certainly had that in spades. The small art gallery in Chicago’s Lincoln Park where she’d directed sales for the past eight years had been gradually cutting back on staff and was forever on the precipice of closing, thanks to newly budget-conscious customers and shrinking commissions. She couldn’t afford to lose her job, not when she would have to pay the rent solo since Nate had moved out.

  Abby felt quite a lot like a walking cliché: on the brink of forty, careening toward a midlife crisis, and barely holding it together. So she couldn’t be pregnant, not now of all times. Having a baby didn’t fit into her plans, and it made no sense besides.

  “It just can’t be,” she kept telling herself, because she’d heard statistics on women her age conceiving naturally and the numbers bordered on anemic. Still, somewhere in the back of her head there was a tiny seed of hope it might be true.

  To stop herself from second-guessing, she went by the drugstore on her way home from work, buying a new toothbrush, a bar of soap, and a box of First Response. Not even bothering to take off her coat, she’d shut herself into the bathroom and locked the door, despite being the only one there. Since their argument weeks before, Nate had moved across town and was camping out on the couch of his brother, Myron.

  Gulping down water in between, she somehow managed to pee on all three plastic sticks within an hour, and she stared at each for a full ten minutes until every blank oval had sported twin pink lines.

  Pregnant. Pregnant. Pregnant.

  Though the package insert illustrated that she was clearly knocked up, a tiny warning indicated that women aged forty and up might show false positives because of something called “pituitary hCG.” Abby had months to go before she gave up thirty-nine for good, but it was enough to fan the seeds of doubt.

  She showed up bright and early at her doctor’s office the following morning, waiting to have blood drawn, all the while trying to convince herself that she had something else, like mono, Epstein-Barr, or anemia. Surely those things could throw over-the-counter pregnancy results off-kilter, and any one of those diagnoses made more sense, considering how she’d been regularly missing meals and rest.

  And still, she couldn’t concentrate on work or sleep that night, pondering what the blood tests would reveal. She stayed awake, gazing at the ceiling, wondering how this could be happening to her at such an inopportune time.

  When Dr. Epps had phoned the next afternoon with her lab results, Abby couldn’t help asking, “What’s the verdict?” all the while gnawing on a coarse bit of skin near her thumbnail. “Please tell me all I need are iron pills or a vacation.”

  “Well, I’d hardly advise any patient against a vacation, but that won’t change the facts. Everything’s perfectly normal, but”—there, Dr. Epps had hesitated.

  “But what?” Abby had asked, biting the inside of her cheek and tasting blood.

  “Congratulations, Abigail. You’re absolutely, one hundred percent pregnant.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure as shootin’,” the doctor had chirped. “We should set up an ultrasound so we can figure out better how far along you are, although your hormone level’s consistent with seven or eight weeks. We also need to get you on prenatal vitamins. Should I turn you over to Nancy to make the appointment?”

  “Um, no, not just yet,” Abby had mumbled. “I’ll have to call back, okay?”

  At which point she’d dropped the phone to the floor and stood with her mouth open, eyes wide, and knees wobbling, certain she was having an anxiety attack. When she’d recovered enough to cross the kitchen, she’d grabbed the calendar from the refrigerator door, counting backward, trying to figure things out.

  Had she and Nathan even had sex those two months past? They’d been growing increasingly distant since New Year’s, and it was both their faults. Though, really, all it took was once, right? One night without a condom when a single sperm got lucky enough to do the deed. If only they hadn’t argued, she thought; if only they hadn’t been living such separate lives. How Abby wished things were different, how desperately she wanted to call Nate straightaway and say, “Babe! You’re not going to believe this!” But she couldn’t.

  She had to quit staring at the calendar when her eyes began to blur. She was too tired to pinpoint dates, exhausted by long days at the gallery and late evenings squirreled away in the spare bedroom with her easel and paints, deliberately avoiding the things that were missing from their relationship. And if she’d been hiding out, Nate had been no better, burying himself in his laptop, endlessly working on new apps and often disappearing at odd hours for meetings at coffeehouses, clearly more committed to his goals than to Abby.

  Her last attempt to put them on the right path had failed miserably. “We need to do something about our situation.” She had confronted him two weeks before, after gathering up the courage to instigate the kind of conversation she knew Nate dreaded most. “We can’t go on this way. It’s not healthy.”

  “If it ain’t broke,” he had countered. And though he’d grinned a nervous grin, Abby had read the panic in his eyes.

  Any stabs at discussing their living arrangements always made Nathan so jumpy. She could mention something as simple as needing new silverware, and he took it as a prelude to a lengthy discourse on the M word. Maybe it was her small-town roots or being raised without her father, but Abby had a traditional streak that went beyond the need to share a bed and an apartment. She’d always assumed that living together would eventually lead to marriage, but as she found herself wanting to nest more and more, she’d sadly realized that Nate wasn’t quite so willing and able.

  “I feel like I’m floundering,” she’d told him, and not for the first time. “Don’t you want to move forward instead of running in place?” she couldn’t help asking him. “Don’t you want to make this permanent before it’s too late?”

  “When is it too late? There’s nothing wrong with taking the proper time to figure things out,” he had replied, as if reminding her that six years together didn’t ensure that they were meant to be. “My parents were married twenty years before they divorced,” he’d added, his routine argument in such a case. “There are never guarantees that how you’re feeling today will be precisely what you’re feeling tomorrow.”

  Okay, sure, Abby understood that his folks’ splitting up had traumatized him, but she’d never known how much until she’d experienced his resistance to lifelong commitment. Unless it was just a convenient excuse for him. Either way, his argument was getting old, as was she. If you truly loved someone, she believed, being with them forever should feel right, destined even.

  “There aren’t guarantees for anything,” she’d remarked, another tidbit she’d thrown at him over and over. “My mom didn’t even have a chance to marry my dad before he went overseas, and I know she always regretted not asking him to stay.”

  Gretchen Brink had never married, had never even been in love with anyone else but Sam Winston, so far as Abby was aware. Not that her mother had said as much outright, but it was clear in the way she behaved, in her tone of voice and the softening of her eyes whenever she mentioned Sam’s name. Abby didn’t want to end up like that, alone and always wondering what could have been. She and Nate had to seize the day. No one could see into the future. They could both live another fifty years or fall off the El platform onto the tracks and get run over tomorrow.

  Because, when it came down to it, Abby truly loved Nathan March. If Nate’s passion was equally intense, then expressing his commitment to her—say, in the form of an engagement—seemed perfectly reasonab
le.

  “Love is all you need,” she had insisted because she believed it.

  Nate had merely sniffed. “That’s a Beatles song, not reality.”

  But Abigail had always believed that songs, like art, often revealed universal truths, and the fact that love made the world go round was one of them. What she wanted was an unshakable commitment to a future together, not a roommate who paid for pizza and kissed her and told her she was sexy (however nice all those things might be). It took everything she had to finally put her foot down and give him an ultimatum.

  “If you’re not sure in this moment that you want to be with me forever, then I think you should move out until you make up your mind.”

  “You want me to go?” At first, Nate had seemed truly stunned. Then he’d burst out laughing. “You’re joking, right? You’re kicking me to the curb because I don’t share your fairy-tale view of marriage?”

  “I’m not kicking you anywhere, Nathan. I’m merely suggesting that you leave until you decide whether I’m ‘the One’ or not,” Abby had explained in the clearest way possible.

  He had arched a furry eyebrow. “The One? Do you know how archaic that sounds?”

  “Maybe to you, but not to me.” The more he seemed to mock her, the angrier she’d become. How could he be so dense, as if after six years together he had no clue about her desires? When it came to marriage, he seemed to have a complete mental block. “If you don’t know for certain and you think there’s someone better for you out there, I can’t have you around. I turn forty this year. I don’t have time to waste, and I need to know I’m as important to you as you are to me. Right now, I have my doubts.”

  “C’mon, Abs, this isn’t funny.” He had stared at her until his smile died, finally grasping the idea that she wasn’t joking around. “You’re really serious?”

  “Totally.”

  “Wow.” His Adam’s apple had bobbed, his wide forehead pleating. “You know I love you or I wouldn’t be here. I would have left ages ago. But I stay because I wake up in the morning and want to be with you that day. Isn’t that enough?” Heat had flushed his cheeks. “Do you want me to drop down on bended knee and propose? Should I promise you forever because it’s what you want to hear?”

  “No”—she had shaken her head as tears stung her eyes—“not if you don’t really mean it.”

  He’d pinched his lips together, looking pained, and his hazel eyes had darkened, wounded. “I’ll do whatever you want,” he finally told her, grudgingly. “It’s your call, and maybe you’re right. Maybe we both need some space to think.”

  “Yes, space to think,” she’d agreed, though it tore her in two just to say it.

  And, just like that, Nate had stuffed his gym bag with underwear, T-shirts, socks, toothbrush, and toothpaste. He had held her hand for a moment before he’d walked out the door, mumbling something about crashing with Myron until she came to her senses. His head low, he’d dragged his heels down the hallway as though, any second, she would call him back and tell him she didn’t mean it, that having a ring on her finger didn’t matter.

  But it did. It really did.

  So Abby had shut and bolted the door behind him, thinking that any minute she would hear his key in the lock, that he’d come back and blubber that she was most assuredly the One and he couldn’t live without her.

  Five minutes passed, then twenty more, until an hour had gone by and Abigail had ascertained that he wasn’t returning. At least not right away. She had messed up her bed and now she had to lie in it.

  That fight seemed so long ago, especially since her call from Dr. Epps. Two weeks apart from Nate felt like years; fourteen long days in which they had spoken only a few times when he’d phoned to say he needed to drop by to pick up a gadget or more underwear. Abby had been careful not be anywhere around when he did. That would have only confused her all the more.

  Despite the fact that she considered herself an independent woman, she felt unsettled and weak without him, as if she’d removed an internal organ required to properly function. Then to hear that she was having a baby. Nate’s baby.

  It was almost too much to take.

  Abby knew she couldn’t stay in the apartment alone, not while she was so aware of the new life taking root inside her, the tiny seed of a baby that was partly Nate’s too. If she was going to get through this, if she was going to figure things out, it wouldn’t be here. She couldn’t tell Nate. She refused to have him beholden to her because of her pregnancy. If he came back—if they decided to make a go of it again—it had to be because of love and love alone.

  She couldn’t explain to her friends in Chicago, because they were Nate’s friends, too. They would spill the beans to him, and she wasn’t ready for that yet.

  The only place where she could take refuge was home. She craved a chance to pause and draw in a deep breath. Lots of deep breaths. Becoming a mother changed everything, and she was sure her own mom would understand better than most. When Gretchen had given birth to Abby, she had done it alone, and Abby needed reminding that such a fate wasn’t the end of the world.

  Besides, she felt inexplicably drawn to the farmhouse where she’d been raised. She yearned to soak in its calm and sleep in her old bed in the room that had once been her father’s—the father she’d thought about so often as a child, the one she’d wished so hard would return every time she’d blown out a candle on a birthday cake. Though she’d never met the man, he still loomed large in her life. Samuel Henry Winston, son of a walnut farmer, grandson of a rainmaker, and “the best friend I ever had,” according to her mother.

  Abby had only his photograph, one Gretchen had given her ages ago, of a teenager in overalls with a long face, dark hair, and piercing eyes. “He was like no one else, attuned to nature in ways most folks aren’t,” her mom had said. “When Sam wept, the clouds would open wide and cry with him,” Gretchen would explain while Abby ate up every word like she was listening to a favorite bedtime story. “And when he smiled one of his rare smiles, the sun beamed so brightly it was blinding.”

  “Do you figure he can see me?” Abby would frequently ask, and her mother had replied with an ebullient nod. “I have a feeling he’s watching you always and that he’s much nearer than you think. If he could find his way back, he would, I’m sure of it.”

  Just as Abby needed to find her way back now.

  Perhaps the baby was a sign that she’d gotten off track, that she’d lived her life according to Nate for so long that she’d pushed aside what was most important. Her mom and her aunts. The farm. The family. Her dad.

  “We’re going home,” she said and put a hand on her belly. Exhaling softly, she picked up her cell phone, hesitating but a second before she dialed Walnut Ridge. Her mother’s phone rang and rang and rang without an answer, which worried her a little. Someone was always around the house, if not Gretchen then Aunt Bennie or Aunt Trudy.

  She hung up and tried again, only to get a rapid busy signal.

  Maybe they were having trouble with the lines. Could be a squirrel had chewed through them again. That had happened on more than one occasion, and it took the devil to get the service truck out to the old farm for repairs.

  Well, no matter, she told herself, ending the call. She’d call the office and tell Alan she was taking some sick days. Then she’d pack a bag and catch a cab to the train station. Her mom had told her over and over again, “If ever you need me, I’m here for you, any day, rain or shine.”

  And, at the moment, Abby needed her something fierce.

  Three

  Time stood still as Gretchen listened to the freight-train-like charge of wind and the barrage of hail pelting the house with a relentless rat-a-tat-tat.

  “It’s right on top of us,” Bennie said, gripping her sister’s hand so tightly that the blood ceased to flow to Gretchen’s fingers.

  Matilda scrabbled over her feet to get to Trudy’s lap, and Gretchen found herself holding her breath until she finally had to gasp, sucking in dus
ty air that tickled her throat and left her coughing.

  As suddenly as it had arrived, the barrage of noise receded, as if someone had shut off a giant switch, and then the room grew deathly still, the only noise their anxious breaths and Trudy’s voice, repeating in a hushed whisper, “We’re okay, we’re okay, we’re okay.”

  When only silence followed, Gretchen dared to open her eyes to see an impatient Matilda pacing. “Is it gone?” she asked.

  Bennie loosened her death grip and tipped her head from side to side. “Yes, it’s gone,” she said and smiled with relief. “We made it.”

  So far as we know, Gretchen mused. At least, the house hadn’t fallen down around their ears. Still, she was afraid to see what was upstairs and even more frightened of what lay outside.

  “Let me go up alone to check,” Gretchen said and released her sisters’ hands before rising from the folding chair. She turned the flashlight toward the stairs and headed up. Though the ceiling bulb remained dark, she didn’t worry about leaving Trudy and Bennie in the gloom. They were perfectly capable without the light and, besides, they wouldn’t go anywhere until she gave the all clear.

  She could barely breathe as she unlocked the door at the top of the stairs and opened it, part of her fearing there would be nothing beyond but rubble. Instead, she peered into the kitchen, where everything was as they’d left it.

  “We’re good!” she called down to her sisters. We lucked out, she told herself as she heard the scuffle of their footsteps on the steps behind her, Bennie appearing first and then Trudy, just as they’d emerged from Annika’s womb.

  “It’s so gray in here,” the elder twin said, touching her way toward the kitchen sink. “The electricity must be off, eh?” she asked, perceiving the subtle change of dark and light.

  “You’re right,” Gretchen confirmed and tried the kitchen switch, thumbing it on and off to no avail.

  “Well, it’s a good thing we have a gas stove,” Trudy cheerily remarked, easing her way across the room toward the pantry. “I’ll put a kettle on and make us all a cup of tea. Chamomile, I think, to calm our nerves. My heart’s still racing.”