The Last Night at Tremore Beach

by Mikel Santiago

  Overhead, the great Goddess of the Storm had begun to stir, roiling in labor pains.

  I leaned into the gas, a bit. I didn’t want to still be on the road when this mother started bearing her young, unleashing them on the earth below. But just as I crested the hill, something up ahead made me slam on the brakes.

  A tree branch in the middle of the road.

  It was an enormous branch, one of the four or five main ones from the lovely old elm at the top of Bill’s Peak. One of the ends of the branch was charred and still smoking, and I guessed it had been severed by a bolt of lightning. The gale-force winds must have tossed it right into the middle of the road.

  I ducked my head and peeked up through the front windshield. The thick blackness overhead had started to rotate directly over my car. There were flashes from deep within it and thunder that rumbled like a sleeping giant who’d been abruptly awakened.

  If I had driven a Land Rover Defender like Leo’s instead of a Volvo V40, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it: I’d drop it into low gear and climb over the thing. I’d worry about coming back to move it tomorrow. But the domesticated underbelly of my station wagon wasn’t having that. I’d bust a wheel or an axle, for sure. Plus, the O’Rourkes would be coming down the path later, and they might not see it before it was too late.

  So I decided to act as quickly as I could.

  I hopped out of the car and as soon as I did, I realized how dangerous this was. Everything I knew about lightning storms told me I was in exactly the wrong place: at the top of a hill, next to a tree, right below a storm cloud that was ready to burst.

  Not tonight, Peter.

  I remember hearing somewhere that you were safe inside a car (as in an airplane) during a lightning storm, that electricity from a lightning strike grounded itself without affecting anyone inside. I was about to sit back inside. Maybe it’d be easier to drive around it . . . dammit. Come on, Pete. Stick your chest out and be a man.

  The wind gusted furiously. I looked up at the ancient elm, mutilated and still smoldering, and I could smell a burning in the air. But not the smokiness of a fireplace or barbecue, rather the electric char of a short circuit. It reminded me of the time my daughter, Beatrice, stuck her finger in an electric socket when she was just four years old. The lights in the entire house flickered and when we found her, her eyebrows were standing on end. That’s what it smelled like tonight.

  Overhead, the writhing, twisting darkness let out a powerful roar that shook the earth beneath my feet. I looked up and noticed some kind of light coming from deep within the storm. A twister of blue light.

  Lightning never strikes the same place twice, I told myself.

  Still, the quicker you get out of here, the better.

  I grabbed one end of the branch but the damn thing weighed more than I had imagined. I started pushing it as if I were trying to move the minute hand of a giant clock, turning it toward the side of the road. Behind me, the beach was shrouded in darkness. Only the white breakwater could be seen crashing onto the shore.

  I pushed until the branch was parallel to the side of the road. That should do it. I let it drop with a thud, and I dusted my hands on my jeans. I took one step toward my car, and that’s when I noticed something all around me.

  Light. Too much light.

  At first, I thought it was the Volvo’s headlights. Maybe I’d flicked on the fog lights by mistake? All I knew is that it was suddenly very bright—almost too bright.

  A little dizzy, I started to walk back toward the car, and then I noticed something else. It felt like an electrical wave was running over and through my body. A tingling that snaked from my neck to my backbone, down to my fingertips. I looked down at my arms and saw the hair standing on end, perfectly straight, like the quills of a sea urchin. It was as if someone had hung a magnet directly over my head. . . .

  Over my head . . . ?

  I looked up one last time. The whirlwind of blue light twisted above me, picking up speed, like a record spinning at a thousand revolutions a minute. Lightning never strikes the same place twice.

  I felt something in my temples. My car’s headlights suddenly seemed too bright, hurting my eyes and becoming an all-encompassing whiteness. I had just enough time to realize what was happening. It was just a moment, and I think I even tried to run for the car, but I never made it. And that’s when I felt it: something bit me; my face, my shoulders, my legs. It shook me like a rag doll and tossed me aside.

  It felt like a thousand-pound safe had landed squarely on my head, knocked me to my knees, and exploded as if it had been filled with dynamite. My eardrums were overwhelmed. They simply shut off, faded to white. . . .

  I felt I was screaming and falling in slow motion, waiting for my body to hit the ground with a thud. But it never came. I fell, and continued to fall, into an endless sea of darkness.

  FOUR

  I OPENED MY EYES and felt a terrible nausea. Where was I? Wherever it was, the world here was spinning.

  “Look! He opened his eyes,” someone said. I recognized the voice: Marie.

  I was in a car racing at top speed.

  “Marie . . . pull over, I need to throw up.”

  I felt the car screech to a halt. I reached toward the door handle, holding back the rising bile, opened the door, and let it all out.

  Other doors opened. I heard footsteps. They came closer.

  “There’s a bottle of water in the trunk. And paper towels. Bring a few.”

  I felt someone patting my back.

  “That’s it, son. Let it all out.”

  Someone handed me an opened bottle of water. I sipped it. It made me feel better. Someone else handed me a paper towel. I blew my nose and wiped my mouth. I had a sickening taste in my mouth. Even so, I managed to say thank you.

  I tried to open my eyes, but they felt too heavy.

  “Is he conscious?” another voice said. I recognized it as Frank O’Rourke’s.

  “Looks like it,” Leo said.

  I turned my head and tried to look at them but could only make out silhouettes.

  “What happened?” I asked aloud.

  “You passed out, Peter, but you’re doing okay. We’re on the way to the hospital.”

  “The hospital?” I asked. “Are you kidding?”

  “It’s no joke, bud. We think you were struck by lightning. Now, lie back down. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  I’m not sure how long we drove. I kept fading in and out, and the last thing I remember was arriving at the hospital (Dungloe Community Hospital, I’d later learn) and being carried in by Leo and Frank. A pair of nurses rushed from their station to heave me onto a gurney. Marie held my hand and told me everything was going to be all right as the gurney rushed down a hall.

  You’ll be fine, Pete, a voice said.

  I closed my eyes and passed out again.

  MY DOCTOR WAS NAMED Anita Ryan, a pretty, stout, redheaded woman with freckles who spoke quickly and assuredly. She read my pulse, listened to my heart, and checked my pupils with a penlight.

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

  “I think I got hit by lightning.”

  She started by asking me a few simple questions. My name, my age. “How did this happen, Mr. Harper? Where did you feel the impact? Does it hurt anywhere?” I tried to explain what I remembered. The car, the tree branch in the middle of the road, that blinding white light. The blue whirlwind overhead. It felt like something had clocked me on the head . . . and now I had a pounding headache and nauseating dizziness. Even my skin hurt.

  The doctor said I’d need a brain scan. She injected something into my arm, and I lay back down onto the hospital bed. I was wheeled down another corridor into an X-ray room. They fed me into the belly of an enormous scanner, and I lay still, listening to indistinct thumping and whirring all around me. My headache eased a bit and the tingling in my skin subsided. I figured whatever sedative they’d given me had taken effect.

  An hour later, the doc
tor met with me again. Everything was fine, she said. They hadn’t found anything I needed to worry about. My brain scan was clear. I was “lucky,” she said, although she still seemed worried I’d felt the blow on my head.

  “Now . . . I want to show you something,” she said.

  She asked me to sit up on the edge of the bed and take off my shirt. When I did, under the florescent hospital lights, I discovered something unbelievable. The left side of my body, from my neck to my chest, going down to my thigh, was flushed red and covered with a series of strange markings. The shapes looked like the leaves of a fern, and they were so perfectly shaped that it looked like someone had spent weeks tattooing red ink onto my skin.

  The doctor called them “Lichtenberg figures,” named after the German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg who had discovered them. He hadn’t been hit by lightning but had studied electrical currents. Those “tattoos” were the result of capillaries bursting as the electricity passed through my body. The good news is that they would fade in a few days. The doctor told me she’d only seen one other case, a fisherman who’d been struck and marked with the shape of a starfish on his back.

  “He survived, too, thank God,” she said. “Actually, despite what people often say, it’s not rare to survive a lightning strike. It all depends on the amount of energy in a particular bolt, where it impacts the body, and which path it takes. There’s always an entry point, a particular course it travels, and an exit point. The electricity singes everything in its path. How the bolt travels or what organs it hits determines whether it’s fatal. It looks like you were lucky, but you’ll still need to stay overnight for observation.”

  LEO AND MARIE were waiting for me when they wheeled me into my room for the night. The doctor had filled them in. They offered me their phones in case I wanted to call anyone.

  “No . . .” I said. “I’ll be fine. The doctor said it’ll just be overnight. I don’t want to alarm anyone.”

  “Not even Judie?” Leo insisted. “I think she’d like to come and see you.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “I think it’s better I’m alone, what with my painkillers and this hospital smell all over me. Besides, Judie’s busy at the hostel. She told me yesterday they’d just gotten a group of German backpackers in. But, before you go, tell me what happened.”

  It turned out the O’Rourkes had left a half hour after me, and they were the ones who found me. My car was still running with the lights on. When they saw me lying in the mud, completely drenched, they thought I was dead. Laura was so shaken that they had to give her a sedative when we arrived at the hospital, and Frank had taken her home.

  “Please thank them for me when you see them.”

  “We will do. But get ready to be the new talk of the town,” Leo said, smiling. “Leave it to Laura O’Rourke to be the town crier.”

  “Oh, I can only imagine . . .”

  “You two are terrible!” Marie scolded us.

  They insisted on staying, but I finally convinced them to go home. “I don’t plan on dying tonight, don’t worry. Besides, I’d never ask a friend to spend the night in one of those torture devices,” I said, pointing to the uncomfortable chairs.

  “I’m going to leave you my phone,” Leo said, placing his cell phone on the side table. “Have a good night and don’t flirt too hard with the nurses.”

  Marie smacked Leo on the back of the head. She kissed me on the forehead and said goodnight. “Sweet dreams, Pete.”

  THAT NIGHT, electricity must still have been coursing through my body, because I couldn’t sleep a wink. My head started pounding again.

  I lay awake imagining the hours ticking away. Beyond the door, I could hear the rumblings of the hospital: a patient whimpering, a nurse pacing, the television blabbing in some other insomniac’s room. It had been a long time since I’d spent the night in a hospital. When was it? I could remember it clearly.

  I’m just a little dizzy. It’s nothing.

  Deirdre Harper, my mother, had passed out in a shoe store and a couple of people had helped sit her up. My father had rushed her to the emergency room, and by the time I had arrived on an Amsterdam-London-Dublin connecting flight, she was in observation. “She says she’s fine. That it was just a little dizziness,” Dad had said. We thought we’d all be home for dinner.

  It’s nothing. You’ll see.

  She was a beautiful woman, especially for fifty-two: auburn hair and a smile that could brighten the darkest day. And that’s how I remember her, flashing that smile when they told her they’d have to keep her overnight for a full workup. It was “just for a little while.”

  That’s when I heard it. The same voice that would later speak to me the night of the storm: Say goodbye to your mother, Peter. Remember her this way: in that very dress, carrying that very bag, in those brown shoes, with that lovely auburn hair.

  She must have seen it on my face. I remember her eyes filling with tears, but she managed not to shed a single drop. She was doing it for Dad, of course. She repeated that she’d be home that very night . . . at worst, first thing in the morning. She walked tall past the hospital doors that swung closed behind her and took her from us forever. She would be a slave to a hospital bed, wires and tubes running out of her as she lost her hair, but never that smile, until God took her from us one hard November morning two months later—shattering our happy household, turning my mother into an eternal shadow, and ripping a hole in my chest that would never heal.

  Thinking about my mother brought me to tears in that lonely hospital room in the wee hours, until I finally drifted off to sleep.

  I had a dream that night, and I feel like my mother was in it. She was scared and trying to warn me about something. But I couldn’t understand what she was saying.

  I WOKE UP the next morning with the same headache. The doctor stopped by after breakfast and asked me about the pain. Was it constant or pulsating? As if I could feel my heart beating in my temples?

  “That’s it exactly,” I said. “A throbbing.”

  “Okay. Where do you feel it? Up front, in the back of your head, on one side or all over?”

  I told her it hurt “inside” but more toward the left side. “Any double vision? Flashing lights? Any abdominal pain? Excessive sweating?” The doctor prescribed me some pills. “Take two in the morning, two in the afternoon, and two just before bed, after meals. If the pain continues for more than two weeks, come see me. You should try not to drive the first week, unless it’s absolutely necessary. No drugs, no alcohol.”

  “How about sex?”

  “Like I said, ‘Whatever is absolutely necessary,’ ” she said.

  I noticed a missed call from Judie. I figured Marie and Leo had brought her up to speed.

  I hit redial and after a couple of rings, Judie picked up with her unmistakable, warm, lively voice, though she sounded a little hoarse.

  “Mrs. Houllihan’s store, how may I help you?”

  “Hey, there,” I said. “I just moved into town and want to know where I can rent a good porn flick.”

  Judie burst out laughing. I could picture her sitting quietly behind the counter, engrossed in some thick novel while sipping a cup of hot tea (maybe blackberry or ginseng or some weird variety of herbs she liked).

  For months now, Mrs. Houllihan’s store had stood out among all the other buildings in Clenhburran. Pink facade with windows trimmed in yellow, flowers and flags and little bells everywhere. And miniature Buddhas sitting on the windowsills. On the bottom floor was Mrs. Houllihan’s store, designed with tourists in mind, but which had served during the winter months as a pharmacy, bookstore, toy store, and video rental store. But that was before Mrs. Houllihan had retired two years ago and the sparky young Judie Gallagher had taken over, starting a kind of revolution in the store—and in the town. Now, the old building housed a yoga studio (Judie taught two classes a week) and a massage and acupuncture practice. The place had become the unofficial gathering place of all the town’s women, who had p
reviously met in a back room at the tiny Church of Saint Michael.

  Judie had also renovated the living quarters on the first floor and turned it into a hostel with bunk beds. She catered to backpackers (she’d managed to get Mrs. Houllihan’s listed in Ireland’s Lonely Planet guide last year), as well as musicians who came to play traditional Irish tunes at Fagan’s and lost tourists who hadn’t managed to snag a room in Dungloe and showed up in the middle of the night, begging for a place to stay.

  To top it off, Judie had the best collection of classic DVDs in all of Donegal.

  “Well, we’ve got a fine collection of adult titles,” she said. “You into bestiality? Maybe a little bondage?”

  “Hmm, wow, that all sounds great. But do you have anything involving vegetables? I did grow up on a farm, you know. . . .”

  “Okay, okay, enough, Pete!” she said, cackling. “How the hell are you feeling? Marie called me and told me all about it. Why didn’t you call me last night?”

  “I didn’t want to worry you. And I knew you were busy at the hostel. Besides, it’s not such a big deal.”

  “Jesus, Pete, are you kidding? That’s like surviving a plane crash! I would have liked visiting you last night, even if I had to leave the German backpackers on their own for a little while. Well, are you feeling better? What happened?”

  “Frankly, it’s still hard to process,” I said, thinking back. The light. That whirlwind of blue light . . . “It all happened so fast, but I think I’m okay. My head hurts a little, but the doctor said I should be fine in a couple of weeks.”

  “Marie said you were pretty unscathed except for some burn marks.”

  “Yeah, it’s like a huge tattoo. You know what, I think I kind of like it. Maybe I’ll get one after this is all over. By the way, you missed a hell of a meal last night. And the O’Rourkes.”