Lightning Field

by Dana Spiotta

  Mina sits on a bench by the cathedral.

  So what if it ended there? Couldn’t that be the way it went? But there was more, and Mina couldn’t stop thinking of it now. The relentlessness of memory — she wanted to remember slowly and accurately, not mess the order, so she could find her way to thinking about it.

  He left school later that semester, just missing his graduation. There was an incident of some kind — why didn’t she know exactly? He tried to return the next year but went back into the hospital. To stay for a long time. He wanted to. Yes, that’s it,that’s what she was trying to remember. This part. He never asked her to visit. But he wouldn’t have to, would he? Finally, after six weeks she did go. He looked so awful, gray-skinned and with those burns under his bathrobe. He was blank and silent. He smoked cigarettes and stared through her. The place was painted that green-yellow hospital color. The vague urine scent in the room, overlaid with peroxide and ammonia. And did she grab Michael and kiss him and hold his hand? Did she visit him again and try to bring him around? Did she tell him it would be all right? Did she ever even once write him back? It was unbearable for her to see him like this, this wasn’t her brother. What the fuck are all these cigarette burns? Mina wanted to scream. Why do you suck your cigarette like that? But she said nothing. It was part of the distance she had with him, had to have. Because she really didn’t want to know. After that one time, she never visited him in the hospital, no matter how often he asked. She was busy. She’d see him when he got out. It was better for him. She would just upset him. She was so busy. She simply refused to see him this way. And somehow, after enough time, the estrangement became ordinary and everyday. Eventually it became something she didn’t think about, pushed back into a secret compartment of her life.

  Her mother said it was all the same, anyway. Wouldn’t have made a difference. But Mina knows better: it would have made a difference right now, remembering this. It would have made a difference right now if she had just done just the smallest bit better. It would make a difference to her.

  Mina thinks, Lorene, I wish you were here. If you were here now, I would tell you there are people who with the tiniest kindnesses can save your life, and if we understood that, just the extraordinary effect of the measliest attempts to comforteach other, even just that, we might lead very different lives.

  And Lorene would say, Natch. Of course, doll.

  Lisa isn’t sure exactly what has happened, she is trying to figure out how to think about it. It is certainly bad, though, isn’t it? Alex and Alisa are crying, and she is trying to comfort them. They both fight her when she pulls them into her arms. They cry to each other, not to her. They are, in fact, crying at her.

  Michael had finally woken up after half an hour or so of sleeping. Lisa had been in the room the whole time, watching him and keeping the kids occupied with a board game on the floor. Michael woke up with a start, sitting upright on the couch. He looked dizzy for a moment, eyes quickly scanning the room. He jumped up from the couch and looked frantically behind him, and then finally at the three of them on the floor. Lisa smiled at him, cautiously, but already she felt a sick surge of anxiety, a physical thing, a wave through her spine and in her shoulders. He didn’t smile back, she remembers, but stared wildly at her, confused, wide-eyed.

  “Where am I?” he said. Lisa stopped smiling, she felt parts of herself sinking, even falling. The strange sensation of adrenaline starting to edge in.

  “Lorene’s house.” Still he stared at her, disoriented. He glanced from her to the room and back again.

  “What?”

  “The hills above Hollywood Boulevard. Lorene Baker’s house.”

  He took a deep breath and nodded, closing his eyes.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said, but the question had more fear than concern in its tone, didn’t it? It sounded like anaccusation. She was no longer on the floor, but standing. Alisa and Alex were watching her and watching Michael. There was perhaps a second, a tiny pause, in which the four of them took in one another.

  “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to spook you, did I spook you, I’m so sorry,” Michael probably said. Something like that. And Lisa thinks she remembers this vaguely, but actually, she is almost certain that Michael started to cry.

  “What is wrong with you?” she said again, and she heard herself sounding angry. Alisa grabbed her calf and started to cry.

  “A lot. I’m so sorry,” Michael said, and his nose was running a little and he wiped it with the back of his hand and sniffed. The scars again.

  Lisa frowned. “You have to leave now.”

  Michael looked at her wearily and didn’t move.

  “Leave now,” she said again. She put her hand on Alisa’s head and stared at him. Michael got up finally and started to walk, then stopped.

  “What?” she said.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Lisa double-bolted the door behind him and watched him until he left the steps at the bottom of the walkway. She watched him through pulled-shut curtains. And, yes, for a few seconds after, she watched. While they cried.

  “You never can tell about people, now can you?” she says. The kids continue to cry. Sob, more like. She realizes she is shaking a bit. Odder still, the sinking feeling hasn’t left. She almost thinks she might have got it all wrong. She is so tired. What has happened? She’s prettty sure she’s getting everything wrong. She is so exhausted. She watches her children, bewildered. No mistaking it. Alex and Alisa are crying at her.

  Lorene sits in an expensive restaurant on the edge of the French Quarter. She looks at her hands, not really recognizing them. She puts them under the table, suddenly self-conscious. She thinks about calling Mina, seeing how it all went. Truth is, she is kind of dying to talk to Mina, misses her in a bored, sentimental way. She doesn’t mind that, either. She eats her dinner slowly and studies the staff as they work. Lorene examines silverware and feels with two fingers the paper the menu is printed on. She lifts the bread plate, a lovely simple bone china, to see if she has correctly guessed the name of the manufacturer. Of course, and this pleases her. The waitress stands by her table as Lorene engages her in conversation. After a couple of minutes of talking, the waitress nods distractedly, looks away for a second. Oh, God, Lorene thinks, it’s happening — I’m becoming one of those people who tries to have personal conversations with waiters.

  Mina gets up, washes her face. She takes a shower. She dresses and eats breakfast. She gathers her things together and boards a plane for L.A. She would have dinner with David that night. Which seems, at this long-distanced point, pretty good. Something everyday and ordinary and deeply familiar.

  Mina stretches in her seat on the airplane, half watches the inflight film with no headphones.

  Last night Lorene had called her from New Orleans. Woke her up. Lorene said she would be going back to California in a few days. Mina said, “It’s only been a week, Lorene.”

  But it seems Lorene has a great idea for a new restaurant. Something so diabolically clever that it requires an in-person meeting of Pleasure Model Enterprises. It had come to Lorene suddenly, eureka-ish, in a lightning voodoo moment sometime between her paraffin pedicure and her painful but necessary Brazilian bikini wax.