The Truth About Love and Lightning

by Susan McBride

“Are you sure you’re up to it?” Gretchen asked, hopping onto rubber-booted feet. “I’d be happy to show you around the farm but only if you feel strong enough.”

  “I’m slow, but mobile,” he assured her, taking a few steps to prove it. “Just a touch wobbly, enough so that I wouldn’t mind an arm to lean on, if one of you kind ladies is amenable to joining me.”

  “Please, let me take him,” Abby said, scrambling out of the wicker chair so hastily she nearly toppled it over. “A walk would do me good, too.”

  Gretchen frowned her disapproval. “I’m not sure that’s wise. He’s still weak, and you’re—”

  Pregnant, Abby figured was forthcoming.

  “Exhausted,” her mother finished diplomatically. “You only just got up, and you really need to eat.”

  “I’m fine.” Abby didn’t want to take no for an answer. In Chicago, she could hold her own with egomaniacal artists and art dealers, yet she fell so easily into the role of eager-to-please daughter when she was back in Walnut Ridge. “Are you all right with my being your tour guide?”

  The man nodded. “Right as rain.”

  “Abs,” Gretchen said in that drawn-out way so that even one simple syllable brimmed with concern.

  “Please,” Abby tried, all she had left. There was little she could do to persuade her mom to change her mind when it was made up.

  “Oh, dear.” Gretchen’s face hid nothing well, and Abby could plainly see that she was nervous, undoubtedly worried that Abby might lose her mind and say something that would freak out their guest. Finally, her mother sighed. “All right, go on without me.” She faced the man who now stood near the railing, one hand upon it for support. “Just take it easy, and don’t go far.”

  “Easy is about all I can do at the moment,” he replied.

  “While you two wander about, I’ll get dressed and rustle up some breakfast for Abby.” Gretchen put a hand against her daughter’s cheek. “I’ll give a holler in twenty minutes if you’re not back.”

  “Got it,” Abby replied and added softly, “Please, don’t worry.”

  The man offered Abby the crook of his arm. “I guess I’m all yours, Miss Abigail.”

  As her mom looked on, Abby touched him rather tentatively, wondering if she’d feel some kind of current between them, a physical sense of reconnection. Instead, when she grasped his elbow, she felt an ease that she rarely experienced with anyone but her aunts and her mother. Maybe that was sign enough.

  They proceeded gingerly down the porch steps and away from the house.

  He paused not far along the path toward the barn and tipped back his head, drawing in a deep breath. “It’s good to be alive on such a pretty morning,” he said, looking oddly relaxed for someone in strange surroundings.

  “I guess it is,” she agreed.

  Abby led him on a path across the lawn, avoiding broken branches the storm had tossed around the grass like land mines. The lawn was slick, damp with dew; the earth still soft from the rain. But they were in no hurry, and Abby didn’t mind the snail’s pace.

  “You grew up here?” he asked, stopping again to catch his breath as they neared the barn.

  “My whole life,” Abby said, nodding at the big red structure that once held goats and pigs, even a couple dairy cows. Now it merely housed old harvesting equipment that was probably as rusty as the exterior paint was worn and the boards warped. “I had a lot of freedom,” she said, squinting at the rising sun peeking over the roof. “I used to run around barefoot and pretend I was a bird or a horse. I’m glad I grew up when I did. It was a different time, you know? There wasn’t so much pressure to prove yourself or be someone you’re not.”

  “You can only be who you are,” the man said, making it sound so simple.

  She put a hand on her belly, wondering what it would be like for her baby if it grew up in the city, raised in a world full of immediate gratification, communicating by instant messages, forgetting what it felt like to share real intimacy or to talk face-to-face.

  “There’s something about all this green,” the man said, turning his head as he took in their bucolic surroundings. “And the blue sky’s so close you could touch it. I’ll bet you miss it when you’re gone.”

  “I do,” she told him. “More than I realized. My head feels clearer when I’m here, and not just because I can’t use my cell or a laptop on the farm.” She tried hard to explain. “I feel like time stands still, you know? Like I can pause and mull things over without the world passing me by while I make up my mind.”

  “Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.”

  “Do you recall anything about your home, even if it’s just the feel of it?” Abby asked suddenly. “You must have some sense of where you’re from.”

  He rubbed his jaw, a tinge of sadness softening his voice as he countered, “What if I don’t? Am I lost forever?”

  “No, you’re not lost forever,” she replied. “It’s impossible to completely forget your roots.”

  “I hope you’re right.” He turned away from her, glancing around them. “Will you show me the walnut grove where your mother discovered me?”

  “Sure, I’ll show you the grove,” Abby agreed. “Although finding the exact spot where my mom tripped over you is another thing entirely.”

  “Can’t we just follow the Yellow Brick Road?”

  Abby grinned. “Ah, a sense of humor in times of stress,” she said. “I wish some of that would rub off on me.”

  “Maybe it will,” he replied, but didn’t return her smile.

  He took her arm, and they continued toward the walnut grove in silence. There was so much Abby wanted to say but knew she couldn’t. Instead, she allowed herself to do something she rarely did: stay in the moment, enjoy his company and even the weight of his body as he leaned against her. She might not know who he was, but she certainly hadn’t imagined him. If he turned out to be Sam Winston, she would have more time with him to treasure. And if he wasn’t, well, at least she would have this.

  As they got nearer to the trees, his steps grew more hesitant. The ground beneath them seemed a movable thing, littered as it was with walnuts and twigs. Even Abby felt a bit clumsy on her feet.

  “You doing okay?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, though his breaths became noisy as they drifted between the rows of trees, searching for something Abby couldn’t see.

  A light mist thickened the air around them the deeper they went into the grove.

  Abby had a sense that the clouds had been hung too low that morning. The fog made it hard to tell where exactly they were, and she felt nearly lost in her own backyard.

  “It’s here somewhere,” the man told her as they ambled up one row, cutting through to another, until he stopped abruptly and jerked Abby to a halt alongside him. He swiveled right and left until he seemed to zero in on something Abby couldn’t see. “There,” he said and grunted. “It’s right in front of me.”

  “What’s right in front of you?” she started to say, wondering if he’d received some kind of message from the trees. Otherwise, how could he tell? Abby could barely glimpse the tips of her fingers.

  He released her arm and walked through the thick air, each stride filled with purpose. Abby scrambled over the walnuts, the world around her full of fuzzy shapes. She envisioned a blur rushing by her, felt something brush past her leg.

  “Matilda?” she said under her breath, praying it was the cat and not a possum.

  Abby ducked beneath branches to find where he’d ended up. As soon as she was nearer, she spotted him winding around the tree, pausing at times to squat, most likely searching for his wallet or another lost object that would point to who he was.

  “Can I help?” she asked.

  Instead of replying, he muttered, “Strange,” and bent over, plucking up something from amidst the tree’s roots.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I thought they were robin’s eggs, maybe a nest knocked to the ground.” He held his hand out to her
. “It looks like turquoise. Do you recognize it?”

  It was a necklace strung with pale blue stones on a leather tether. Abby gently rubbed away the dirt. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “but I don’t know whose it is.” She gave it back to him. “Maybe it’s yours, and the tornado blew it into the grove along with you.”

  “Perhaps your mother would know.” He slipped the beads into his shirt pocket before turning toward the tree itself. He stared at it, hands on his hips, before he approached, reaching out to touch the V where the trunk was split up the middle. “This is the place,” he said, without a lick of doubt in his voice. “I was here beneath these branches when the lightning struck.”

  “Lightning?” Abby looked cockeyed at him. “You think you were under this walnut tree when it was hit?”

  “I know I was,” he said and wrinkled his nose, sniffing the air. “I remember the jolt and the smell of fire.”

  Abby bit her lip to keep from saying, That’s impossible.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” he remarked as if reading her mind. “But it’s there in my head like the slip of a dream. I’m sure it’s true, but I can’t make sense of it either.” He held up the reddened palms of his hands, gazing at them as if he’d never seen them before. “I can feel the heat on my flesh, the surge of fire through my blood before I fell to my knees.”

  Abby still didn’t know what to think. “You’re sure it was that tree?”

  “Yes,” he said and touched the peeling bark. “This one.”

  But Abby wondered if he wasn’t confused, his brain garbling truth and fiction, as the tree he indicated was one she knew very well from her childhood. She’d even named it, calling it “the treasure tree” because she’d delighted in climbing its gnarled branches and hiding objects in the deeply split trunk. She even knew the secret of how the tree had been nearly sliced in two, something that Sam Winston would have known as well, or should have known if he hadn’t forgotten.

  “That walnut tree was hit by lightning years ago, before I was born. Before you were born,” she told him, because it was at the heart of a story her mother had recited, passed down from Sam’s mother, Lily. When Sam’s grandparents had just moved to the farm, a lightning storm had scorched the barren grove and made the earth come alive again. “So maybe you’re mixed up,” she began in the most sensitive way that she could, “because everyone knows that lightning never strikes the same place twice.”

  “Well, they’re wrong.” He slowly turned to her, and the furrows deepened in his cheeks. “It’s not true that lightning can’t hit the same spot. It does, all the time. Just like a lost love, it can find its way back if you give it half a chance.”

  Abby gazed at him, unblinking, her heart pounding something fierce. She was hardly a New Age crystal-wearing hippie who saw auras and took directions from her dreams. But something strange and complicated was happening here, and it had to do with this man who stood before her.

  A sense of light-headedness overtook her, and she wobbled, a soft “oh” escaping her lips as she closed her arms around her belly. She felt a flutter inside, even though logic told her it was too early to feel the baby move within. “Quickening,” the first movements were called, according to the pregnancy sites she’d scoured these past few days. At eight weeks, her baby was no bigger than a raspberry with a heartbeat. Still, what she’d sensed was very real, and she wondered if what she’d felt wasn’t the baby at all but a sense of her own reawakening, like everything she’d loved wasn’t really lost.

  “You’re expecting,” the man said, and Abby realized he’d been watching her. The directness of his silver-gray gaze was unsettling.

  She could have denied it. That would have been easy. Or she could have said nothing at all.

  But a shaky “Yes” emerged before she could stop it. “I just found out. It’s why I had to come home.”

  “Does the father know?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you love him?”

  What a strange question!

  “Of course I do,” Abby said, defensive.

  “Then why?” he asked, his tone so raw that it made her want to cry.

  Even his own eyes seemed to glisten, and Abby found herself wondering, if he wasn’t her father, why would he care?

  “He left before I knew about the baby,” Abby admitted, willing herself to stay calm despite how her chest ached. “He wanted space to figure things out.” She wasn’t sure why she was sharing so much with him, but she couldn’t stop herself. “I can’t make Nathan feel the way I feel. He has to come back on his own terms or not at all. I don’t want the baby to be why.”

  He sucked in his cheeks, making them appear even gaunter. “I understand how hard it is to find your footing when you’re certain of your heart and the one you love isn’t sure at all.”

  “It stinks,” she said, the mere thought of Nate’s indecision tying her stomach in knots. “I just want to be with him.”

  “Then don’t let so much time and space come between you that, when your minds are made up, it’s too late.”

  She shivered, suddenly wondering if coming home and putting distance between them only pushed Nate further away. Had she made a mistake?

  “You’ll do the right thing,” he said, giving her arm a nudge.

  “How can you be sure? You don’t even know me,” she said, and a sob caught in her throat, despite how she tried to be strong.

  “What I know is that you have a very kind and generous mother.” He turned toward the scarred walnut tree, catching thumbs in his jeans pockets. “Surely the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”

  “I wish you were him,” Abby found herself saying, under her breath, so she thought.

  But somehow he heard. “Who’s that?” he asked and looked at her.

  How tempted she was to blurt out: my father. Instead, Abby told him, “Sam Winston. He was an old friend of my mother’s, and this farm was once his. No one’s seen or heard from him in forty years.”

  “Hmm” slipped from his lips like a breath. “That would explain it.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “Just something your mother said when I was looking over some photos on the mantel. I got the sense she hoped I’d recognize somebody in them. Could be she wishes I were this long-lost friend too.”

  Abby nodded, saying nothing.

  He glanced around him with an uncertain expression, as if absorbing the red of the barn, the blue of the sky, and the green of the grass, perhaps trying to remember or maybe just soaking it all in, imagining what his life would be like if he truly were Sam Winston. “This would be a hard place to forget,” he said.

  Abby sighed. “You’re right, it would.”

  He shot her that barely there smile, and she felt her spirits lift just as the fog began to lift from the air around them.

  “Shall we go back before your mother has to holler?” he asked.

  “Yes, let’s not make her holler. It isn’t pretty,” Abby said and accepted the arm he offered without hesitation.

  With so much weighing on her mind, it didn’t register until they were out of the grove altogether that the once-bare branches of the walnut trees harbored tiny green buds.

  They had come alive again.

  Thirteen

  Gretchen hovered over the sink, gazing out the window, resenting the appearance of the mist that kept her from seeing past the barn to the walnut grove. She was second-guessing herself, wondering if she’d done the right thing letting Abby take the Man Who Might Be Sam on a walk alone. Although Abby seemed better this morning, more her rational self, Gretchen couldn’t stop thinking of the old photograph tucked into the pages of Abby’s sketchbook and all the pencil drawings of an ever-changing Sam.

  “She’s in such a fragile state,” Gretchen said aloud. “I shouldn’t have left them to wander off alone. I should have gone with them.”

  “They’re fine,” Bennie remarked from the breakfast table. “You can’t worry about what may
happen between them. What will be, will be.”

  “It’s true, you can’t fight fate,” Trudy concurred, causing Gretchen to sigh for the thousandth time.

  The twins had eaten already but had stuck around, keeping Gretchen company while she fidgeted. Trudy busily knitted a baby hat for Abby’s unborn child. Yellow yarn unfurled from the ball in her lap while her needles busily clicked.

  “They should be back by now,” Gretchen said, leaning over the counter and so near the glass her breath clouded the panes. “It’s been nearly twenty minutes.”

  She was getting ready to head outside and yell for them to come in for breakfast when she spotted the pair trudging toward the barn, their arms intertwined.

  “Here they come,” she announced and wiped her palms on the thighs of her jeans, trying not to jump out of her skin. Quickly, she concerned herself with heating the skillet, adding a pat of butter before she cracked half a dozen eggs into a bowl and began furiously beating them.

  She was pouring the eggs into the skillet when she heard the slap of the screen door, then the more solid click of the mudroom door. Suddenly Abby burst into the kitchen, her cheeks flushed and eyes bright.

  “Hey!” she said and rushed up to Gretchen, giving her a hug. “You’re not going to believe this! But the walnut trees have buds!”

  “Buds? Are you sure?” Gretchen stared at her daughter, concerned that a gush of pregnancy hormones was making Abby see things. “But that’s not possible,” she said and peered out the window to find the fog lifting; but there was still too much mist for her to make out anything but the ghostly shapes of the trees.

  “I’m not kidding.” Abby sounded just a little out of breath. “The walnut grove seems to have risen from the dead.”

  “Could be the lightning’s responsible,” the man offered, coming up beside Gretchen, their arms brushing as he washed his hands. “Some folks think that a strike can make bad soil turn fertile again.”

  That sounded an awful lot like something Sam would say, Gretchen thought, and her gaze met his. For a second, it seemed that her heart had stopped beating. If he was Sam Winston, had he created the storm that brought him home and conjured up the lightning to bring the grove back to life, just as Hank Littlefoot had years before him? Was that why he couldn’t remember anything?