The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors
Page 32
Becca moved in with Rowan on Cedar Island and immersed herself in her art. In the late 1990s, she and Colin Atwell traveled to Czechoslovakia to visit Terezín. They met one of the camp’s few survivors: Anya—a child then, she was a great-grandmother now, a woman with many friends and passions, a pianist. She told them about her girlhood; about losing her mother and father, her brother and sister; about her nightmares; about the ugliness. She told them about the young woman, Marta, who’d shared her bed in the camp. When Marta was sick, she gave Anya her bread. She told Anya to survive for the both of them. Anya said that Marta used to trace little hearts on her inner wrist (she showed them). Anya said, “Marta would tell me, ‘I’m glad that we’re together. I lost my daughter and you lost your mother, but now we have each other.’ When I cried, Marta told me, ‘There’s no reason for tears. You’re a beautiful girl, and you’re strong,’ and she wiped my tears away. She said, ‘When you’re free, you will make the world beautiful.’”
Anya told Colin and Becca, “I believed everything Marta said to me. I would survive for both of us. I knew it. I believed it. I had faith.”
Without hope … without faith … no one survives.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Michelle Brower for championing my debut novel, to Sarah Knight, my editor, for her passion and hard work. To my mom—for teaching me faith. To Brigitte McCray, Gemma Driver, Tom De Haven, Tommy Van Auken, Carol Stone, Joy Payne, Bill Tester, Kim Lavach, Peter Young, Sal-Baby, my friends and family. Thank you to Christopher Robin for insight, and thank you to Danny Stone for everything.
About the Author
Michele Young-Stone is a lightning strike survivor. She earned her MFA in fiction writing from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2005 and currently resides in Virginia with her husband and son.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Michele Young-Stone
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Shaye Areheart Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
SHAYE AREHEART BOOKS with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Young-Stone, Michele.
The handbook for lightning strike survivors : a novel / by Michele Young-Stone. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Lightning—Fiction. 2. Life change events—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3625.O975H36 2010
813′.6—dc22
2009016611
eISBN: 978-0-307-46449-1
v3.0