Red Lightning

by Laura Pritchett

  I put on an old red pair of tennis shoes that Libby offered me and pace around the yard, sweating and freezing, wiping snot from my nose, digging my fingers in between the bones of my ribcage. How do stars burn cold? How do I burn so cold? I stumble into Amber’s little-girl bike. I walk it down the bumpy dirt driveway and past the cattle-guard and out onto the paved county road, where I start pedaling. My knees go up too far, my gut hurts, my head is pounding. The snot runs faster. The sweat pours. The temperature drops, and I begin to shake.

  In the moonlight, I singsong: Calm, Tess, calm. Try to calm. Stick like a bur to your body.

  The earth smells like rainmelt. Like coldwet dog nose. Like sage and yucca. Like wet cottonwood leaves. I get past the dirt driveway and onto the paved county road and ride and ride and ride. I pedal alongside the moonlit fields of NoWhere, Colorado. A dead skunk in the road, the smell sweeping with me for a good long time. A flattened snake. Cattle that look up to regard me silently in the moonlight. Fields of green winter wheat, just getting tall and growing at this odd time of year. Past dry pastureland, a lone horse standing at the V of a fence. Puddles glisten in the road from time to time, and the bike’s tires slosh through. But to the side, where there is earth, the skin of the earth, the water has been absorbed, seeping into the rockbones underneath, the rockbone of the moon above.

  It is all one blur, one motion, one dance, all singing. Our one big quest is simply this: Who is going to love me?

  Maybe I do love the moon, the rockbones, the spine of the earth.

  Perhaps I do love Alejandra and Slade and Libby and Amber.

  It’s possible I notice small things, such as the way Ed walks like he’s hearing some kind of cakewalk music.

  The way Slade pulls me into his chest, whispers kind things in my ear.

  Maybe I love even Tess and will be sorry to see her go.

  A sudden rise of choking fear. I can’t breathe. I stop the bike and look around. I’m lost. The landscape is so big. I stand with my legs spread over the bike, steadying myself. Close my eyes. Lean over and throw up the dinner. One spasm, two, three. Gasp for sagesweet, smoky air.

  I close my eyes and focus, draw a map of lines in the darkness of my brain. The direction of the mountains, the direction of Lamar, the school, the road to Libby’s house, the road to the old house we grew up in, the road to the place Baxter lived, which is where Kay will be now. I need a compass. I need my instinct. East-then-south. Heartpounder, gutwrencher. Breathe, Tess, breathe, don’t go flying off into the stars.

  IN THE BEGINNING, Tess was oblivious.

  Tess knew that women gringa drivers were less suspicious.

  Tess was in high demand.

  Tess supposed she knew about how humans get packed between hay bales on semi-trucks, frozen in refrigerated trucks, that people die of heat and thirst in the desert.

  But she never saw a woman and a baby and a dream

  cut to the bone like that.

  How many men-in-ties

  suddenly realize their culpability?

  Women in dress suits?

  Bankers? Politicians? People in board meetings and people in elevators and people screaming at kids?

  How many ways are there to be culpable?

  How many people brought that woman to her knees?

  The details are stuck on Tess’s tongue.

  They’ll never come out.

  Chapter Nine

  The bike wheels snap gravel as I turn into the driveway to Baxter’s farmhouse. I get off the bike, stagger, catch my balance, look to the stars, stunned by cold, stunned my directions were right, stunned that the house still sits, stunned that it looks like the same old whitebox-farmhouse, stunned by the way it glows in the moonlight, stunned by the light coming from one window, stunned by the familiar cricket-noise and the wisps of cool air coming from the creek.

  I walk in the open door, grab a coat hanging on a hook, clasp the puff of down jacket to me. Shiver into it my bonedeep chill. It’s only then that I can take in the room. Kay sits in an armchair, lamplit, and I slap a hand over my mouth to trap the noise my surprised breath will make.

  Can a person change so much? Her hair is shaved close, has thinned to scalp. A sore underneath her nose, red and puffy, throbs out from her face, and her lips are drawn tight even as she sleeps. Her leg is propped up on a cushion, the sweatpants pulled up, and there is a purple bruise on her ankle surrounded by yellow skin. Three of her toes are missing, the skin pulled tight over the lumps that are left.

  Behind her chair is a metal hanger from which dangles a plastic bag full of some clear liquid. To the side is a hospital bed, piled with tubes and boxes.

  Tess is glad for this moment,

  to see this without having to fix her face.

  Tess formed and grew in Kay’s body once.

  The womb is the opposite of the desert.

  Oh, how she used to be! Her hair that brightwhited early, ponytailed, wisps of it hanging around her face, which made her seagreen eyes flare. Beautiful when riding her horse. Or when dressed up to go out dancing. Or standing in the kitchen, cooking from time to time. But so angry, so frustrated by being alive in the world, so bitter that the world did not conform to her expectations.

  When I take my eyes from her missing toes and look back at her face, I see she’s opened her eyes. She regards me, hoists an eyebrow. “Don’t let the bugs in.”

  I glance at the bugs buzzing around the light, the big rising moon outside, and I close the screen door and then the wooden door after it. Before I turn back toward her, I breathe in. “OhKay.”

  She rubs her hands on her face. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  I nod, yes.

  “Libby said you were here. It’s been ten years, Tess.”

  I glance over my shoulder, at the door.

  “No.” Kay lifts a hand weakly from her face into the air, then lets it drop on her lap. “Don’t go. Sit down. Tess, you’re shivering.” She nods to a blanket, which I grab and wrap around the coat. “You look lousy. Pale. Skinny. I see your hair is turning gray too. You saw Amber, I suppose? Your own daughter.”

  “Oh-by-god.” But I keep it at a murmur, beneath my breath, so she can’t hear it. I glance around, keep my eyes off her, try to place why this feeling is familiar. Oh, yes—Libby looking at me yesterday—and a strange gurgle of déjà vu rattles over me. This is what it felt like to be Libby, seeing something that hurt the eyes.

  Kay shifts in her chair, and the quiet moan from her wet throat is a purr of pain. “What’s wrong with you? You dying too? You drunk? Why does it smell like smoke outside?”

  I breathe in, sturdy myself. “Wildfire. There’s a wildfire in the mountains.” My voice stutters from the cold, and I press my lips close.

  “Smoke all the way here, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The West is one big firepit now.” Her voice is that of someone fading, fading into sleep or death, but she tries to rouse herself. “Amber doesn’t smile enough. No one notices that.” She leans back, closes her eyes. “I guess neither did you. Smile enough, that is. Neither did any of us.” Then she closes her eyes and says, “I’m so tired. Why don’t you pour us a whiskey? It’s hidden in the stove.” Then, “Don’t just stand there, giving me your pity. I know how I look. I know what’s happening. This is what death looks like. This is what death smells like. Face it.” She waves her bony hand toward the kitchen. “I hid it from Libby and Ed. Puritans. I nearly quit for a long while.”

  I nod in slow motion, turn and walk into the kitchen. Mygod, it has the same old linoleum floor from the ’50s, big gray flowers on a cream white background, and that mesmerizes me, the memories of my childhood self, loving those big blooms for their beauty, sitting on those flowers and talking to Baxter. One moment in particular flies into my head. I’m allowed to chalk the flowers, chalk them pink and light orange and green, with big hunks of chalk, and how I chalked my toes, too, chalked Baxter’s shoes as he sat reading the paper, how he lo
oked at me and laughed sweetly and said, “It’ll wash off, kid. Don’t you do this with crayons, only the chalk, and I wouldn’t do it around Kay.”

  I look from the gray blooms to the rest of the room, wide old countertops and old porcelain sink. It is different, though, too, and it takes a moment to register the stacks of white-foam boxes. I peer in. Latex gloves and gauze and alcohol pads and syringes and canisters of hand-san.

  “Scrub your hands.” Kay is trying to yell it, but her voice is weak and thin. “Especially your cuticles. Use the hand-san. And turn off the faucet with your elbow.”

  I rinse out two glasses that I find in a dusty cupboard. Stare at the boxes. I can’t help the vomit rising up my throat. I swallow it down, but it rises again, and eventually I have to hold my hair back from my face and puke in the sink.

  She’s a skeleton, a skeleton.

  Death is probably tickled pink

  by everyone’s efforts to avoid him.

  Probably he’s a really nice guy.

  Hold it together, Tess, hold it together.

  In between heaves, I hear “Cripes, Tess—” and then, “I should have known,” and “Clean up your mess.”

  I rinse out the sink, rinse out my mouth, rinse off my face. I’m not drunk. Just bikepedaling thirsty, soulwrenched. I very much want to be, though. Want to be drunk. I find the whiskey, pour us two glasses, grab a box of crackers, and go back out to the living room. It’s the same ragtag-olivegreen carpet that Baxter had when he lived here.

  Our fingers touch when I hand her a glass. I raise my arms, let them settle by my sides. Look out the window at the night, at the bugs flying in the beam of the single light on the outside of the shed.

  Kay clears her throat and waits until I turn to her. “Let’s drink,” she says. “Cheers. So, Amber was open to seeing you?”

  My stomach churns, not wanting the whiskey as much as the rest of my body does. “Yeah, she was.”

  “What she needs to do is go ballistic. Cuss you out.”

  “I suppose.”

  “As should I. But as you can see, I got enough trouble on my hands. So if you’re bringing any trouble yourself, or want any sympathy, you can forget that. And if you’re going to act like you have a chip on your shoulder, which is how you’ve been acting since the day you were born, you can just leave.”

  I flop into a chair, across from her, and stare. Drink. Regard her.

  I pop my neck. “Amber says you stepped on a nail.”

  “It’s true. And then I went fishing. That’s what I want my death certificate to say: Nail and fish.” Her eyes light up for a flicker of a moment, and she sadly laughs. “Sounds somehow like Jesus, doesn’t it?” She sighs and scratches her arm. In the lamplight, I see the flakes of skin rise and then settle. “Getting older is just dealing with new kinds of pain. But yes, I stepped on a nail. Nearly went all the way through my foot. Through the sole of my shoe. Foot swelled up. Libby dragged me to the hospital. Got it cleaned up, got antibiotics. But then it came back. Then I went fishing. A lark—hadn’t been for years. Waded in. Because it was hot. Is that such a crime? Well, now that I’ve had time to reflect on it, perhaps it was. Because you never should forget that the earth can kill you.”

  “And?” I sip the whiskey, place a cracker on my tongue. Oh, relief. The buzz is good now, a nice head spin, a bodysoftening.

  Another sigh. “My foot streaked purple. There’s a new strain of staph. There’s a bad one called MRSA you get in hospitals. But there’s a new one, in Colorado’s rivers, called CA-MRSA. Or something like that.” She stares off into space, breathes in. “I’ve been in many hospitals, for many days. I guess some people should just die. The world is too crowded.” She closes her eyes out of pain. A tightness between the eyebrows, a sorrow seeping through eyelids. “But it’s harder than you think. You’re lucky I’m sick. Otherwise, I might not be so forgiving. You sure are one shithead for leaving like that. All this time, with no way to contact you. I couldn’t even tell you about Baxter’s funeral. He loved you so much, you know. And he never got to tell you goodbye.” She opens her eyes briefly.

  I know I should voice words, find my vocalchord voice. “Where’s he buried?”

  “Ashes scattered across this place. Where the pretty rock outcrop is. That’s where I want to be scattered too.” She scratches her thigh, looks at her foot. “Ugly, isn’t it? He was always telling me that he asked his guardian angel to leave him and go follow you. ‘That Tess,’ he’d say, ‘She’s giving our guardian angels gray hairs, and I can hear them bitching about it now.’”

  That makes me smile. “Yeah, that sounds like him.” Then, after a pause, “You can have them back, now, the guardian angels. Seems like you need them more.”

  She holds an ice chunk in her cheek. “I used to not worry about death. But here I am. At the door. And it’s not easy. Tess, if the alcohol-and-pain-pill mix gets me, well, know it was my choice. It’s a nice, neat, no-questions-asked-after way. You know? But still. I guess I should have prepared more.”

  Pause, pause. Can’t argue that. Finally, “It’s your life. As you used to tell me.”

  “It was,” she says quietly. “I suppose I wasted it. I suppose I always felt like I’d gotten the shaft or deserved better. Nothing ever went my way. Never got much of a break. Lord knows I tried. I suppose you know what I mean.”

  The nonsurprise of her saying such a thing sends me up and to the window staring at the moon, and it reminds me of my theory formed on the bus here, about cavernous apologies and thank yous meaning diddlyshit unless you voice them to the appropriate person. Kay never did, and she never will. Perhaps Kay knows what I’m thinking, because just to drive the point home, she adds, “You were always a little shit,” which once-upon-a-time would have sent me storming out, but now I stand firm and keep my eyes trained on the moon.

  The joys and love Tess expected

  from life

  were arid nothings.

  The lifejoy turned out to be badly placed.

  But it was Tess’s job to change her expectations,

  and she didn’t.

  *

  “Tell me one thing about your life.” Kay says this after a few hours of us both drifting in and out of sleep. “So I can try to understand you. Libby will be here sooner or later. Before she gets here, just tell me one true thing. The kind of thing you wouldn’t want her to hear.”

  I sip the whiskey. The blurbuzz of the alcohol has been established, and it must be for her, too, otherwise she wouldn’t ask something so real. The alcohol in my blood helps with my goal of giving her the respect of looking at her, though my eyes keep wanting to dart away.

  I open my mouth. I want to form the words. I want to ask her: Did you ever feel any motherlove?

  Kay looks at me, sharply. “Say something, Tess. Something real.”

  But I shake my head, no. She closes her eyes and does not open them.

  *

  The room has settled into the sounds of predawn. Crickets, birds, an awakening of the earth itself. Kay winces, shifts. She pokes her finger into her leg. “It used to be hot all the way up to the knee. The heat is moving down. Got any open wounds? Keep ’em covered, if you do. This is contagious.” Much later, she rouses herself and says, “Every Saturday, Libby scrapes off my skin. My skin tries to cover the wound, and she scrapes it right off. Because the wound needs to heal from the bottom up. Having skin cover it will just keep the infection buried in the body. She’s still hoping I’ll live.”

  I clear my throat. “There was a young girl I helped. That I loved once. Named Alejandra. I loved her whistles,” I say. “I loved her language. She invented words, just like I did as a kid. She’d say the funniest things—‘Come on, guys, show some leaderism!’—when she wanted the group to perk up. When you did something dumb, she would say, ‘Estupiota!’ When she wanted the radio turned up, she would say, ‘Loud it up!’ She would say ‘limitated’ when she meant limited. When she wanted to eat something, she would say, ‘Where
are some gobbles?’ As in, where are some snacks I can gobble?”

  “That’s funny. Like you used to be. I don’t know what happened.”

  I look at her, cold. You did, I almost say. You happened.

  But Libby’s quiet footfall makes us turn. She’s on her way to work, in her nurse outfit, walking in the door quietly. Without stopping, she gives us a chirpy “Good morning” and me a “You rode Amber’s bike over?” and gives me a look that means It’s good you came here and I know about the fire. Then she moves to the kitchen, returns with a plastic bag. “I’m going to flush out the tubing with saline and hook up a new bag,” she says. “I’ll teach you later, if you want to learn.”

  Kay murmurs, “I know you wish I’d just die.”

  Libby’s hands move over Kay, one fluid motion. She’s graceful, even in her hurry. “Bodies can and do heal.”

  “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter. Well, I want me to die.” Kay closes her eyes. “I’m so unhappy. I’m so uncomfortable.” Then she glances at me. “So how do you feel about your runaway sister coming back? What do you think she wants from us?”

  Libby keeps working with the clear plastic bag she’s hanging. She looks beautiful in this morning light—someone who is doing something, who has a purpose, who has a reason. Her hair is in a raggedy ponytail, and she’s still got on her cheapbrand tennis shoes, but somehow in the nurse outfit, and when she moves so efficiently, she glows.

  She glances at me. “Tess, the drip is set for every two seconds. Kay always tries to speed it up, but don’t let her touch anything. It needs to drop at two seconds.” She waits until I nod, then turns to wrap the bandage around Kay’s wound with a little flair. She tucks the edge under in one swift movement.

  “It’s too damn slow.” Kay closes her eyes. Her words are blurry, marred with the little bit of alcohol she had, the mix with pain meds. “It’s so painful. What kind of god would make us hurt so much?”