Red Lightning (2 page)

“No. I mean it. That's not what I need.”

She takes a deeplong breath in and lets it out in a long quiet sigh. Then she leans over and presses the back of her hand to my forehead, pinches the skin on the back of my hand, feels out my lymph nodes, squats down to peer into my eyes. “You came back to make sure someone would notice your presence on earth? I guess I wish you had another reason. One having a little less to do with you.” But she is tilting my head gently one way, then the other. Her eyes run over my body, her finger running across my face. She puts up a finger to see if my eyes track. “You're dehydrated. Your cheek looks like Amber's knees, scraped up like that. It will heal better with ointment to keep it from drying out—”

“—I wish I were that kind of person, Libby. To come back home out of love. But no. I was born without the warm emotions.”

She tilts her head sideways at me. “Oh, Tess.” Then, “I'm not going to sit down on the sidewalk with you.” But she lowers herself next to me on the curb anyway: her jeans and my sweatpants, the bend of knees, and hearts that are bending, too, because here we sat, together, as children, waiting for Kay, here to this very spot we would come, having walked a bit from the school so that we'd be less visible, so that Kay's voice or muffler would not be so loud. Here we would sit, waiting, looking at the school, the weed-filled drygrass park next to it, the post office, the empty lot with cracked asphalt and weeds. Here we are again.

I double over and stare at my crotch and look inside my brain for the spaces and peace that the pot might still be offering. Sitting like this, crisscross-applesauce, even I am sick with the smell of monthly blood and sex in the bathroom of a Greyhound, the smell of beer on the Colorado State hoodie from the dumpster.

I dig my fingernails into my wrist, and Libby leans forward and hugs her knees. She puts her palm over her nose, and into her hand she
breathes one of those sighs in which you are collecting yourself, and then, hand still over nose, she looks up to the clearblue sky as if she is searching for patience or compassion there. Her eyes move to one side of the street and then the other, perhaps seeing if there's someone hanging around the shadows, if there is someone watching her sister sit in the middle of the sidewalk.

“I'm alone,” I say. “I came alone.”

She nods, taking this in. “Well, I didn't expect this. To see you.”

“—I know.”

“When you left—”

“—I know. It was over, between us.”

“No. What I was going to say was, you were so beautiful.” She takes her hand from her face and gently touches my face. “It's swollen, too.”

Someone revs his truck a few blocks over, there's the distant sound of semi-trucks on the highway, the barking of a single dog, and not a single sound for the blur of tears that rise up in my eyes. We are alone, her eyes and mine. No one is out, the stores haven't opened yet, the kids have been dropped off, and everyone has retreated to allow us this brief flash of time together. My eyes break from hers and focus on one lone figure in the far distance, outside of town, walking a dog and kicking at leaves.

“It's just a missing tooth. I had one pulled the other day.” Then, because speaking-attempt is why I am here, I try to continue, although the words bunch up in my throat for a while and my mouth moves in silence, like a newly caught fish gasping for air. Finally, I add, “It hurt so much, and I was so mad at it for hurting, and I didn't have the money for the pain pills, so I got drunk and went up to a stucco wall and scraped my face against it. Just to show it, I guess, that it could hurt worse. Just to show it who was boss. Crazy, right?”

It occurs to me that my sin is that I've never been sorry for being like this. Making a situation worse. Getting pregnant and then leaving
the baby for her to care for and then belittling her for doing just that. Getting a tooth pulled and then scraping up my cheek because it was hurting and then hating myself for looking so bad. Lose-lose situation for her, for my face, for everything I have made worse because it hurt.

I look over at Libby in time to see her blink, blink, blink, tears are coming, and she's blinking at the brightblue sky, asking the sky to reverse-rain them away. “I don't know what to do with you. I can see you're still . . . Well, listen. I need to get to work. And by the way, Kay is sick. Very sick.”

Kay. White-haired-ponytailed-lousy-mother-Kay. With the green flashing eyes of anger. With the narcissism of a thousand misguided gods. “How sick? Sick enough to die? I bet that is not sitting well with her.”

“You should see her. Before.” She bites another flake of skin on her lip. “So that's not why you came back? To see Mom? Why did you come back, Tess?”

I look at her left hand, which is, somehow, miraculously resting on my knee, and which has a simple silver wedding band that is catching the light. “You ever think that maybe someone just needs to see home before she can leave again? To clarify the direction she'll take? Well. The only thing I know for sure is that I am tired of sleeping in my car and eating out of dumpsters. I've been camping for a long time, but winter is coming. And I wanted to see my sister. And her baby. Who is not a baby anymore, I can see. My compass just brought me here, Libby. It just directed me here. Homing pigeon. Homing magnet. For just a bit. Don't worry, I won't stay long. At one point, I made a list.” Here, I lean to the left so I can dig around in the deep pocket of my sweatpants again, and I pull out a bunch of papers with shit written on them, but I can't find it, so I cram the whole wad of papers back in. “I like lists. They help me think. I learned that from you. I wanted to see Amber. I wanted to see you. I wanted to
be honest. I wanted to come here and be as honest as I could and see what happened to you all. So at least I'd know.”

A pickup truck pulls up to the curb, and a little kid jumps out. The dad yells,
Ride the bus home, dude
, the kid waves a hand backward at his father, brushing the comment away, and then the father looks at us, pauses, looks again, lifts his hand off the steering wheel in that smalltown wave and drives off.

My hands don't know what to do. I start picking at a cuticle and then scratching my wrist, and then I sit on my hands, trying to cage the birds that they are. “So, sorry. I'm nervous. I saw Amber. What grade's she in?”

“Fifth. You smell . . . Tess, you smell . . . like you're rotting. I'm sorry. But it's true. Let's get you somewhere . . .”

“Ms. Skeek still teaching?”

“Nope.”

“Amber a smart kid? Healthy?”

“Yep.”

“Like you.”

“Smarter and healthier than either of us ever were. That's the truth.” She regards her hands, now both in her lap, fingers laced. While she's looking down, I look at her sideways to see a crooked wet stream across her face. The water zigzags down, just like the cottonwood leaves zigzag down through sky above her. She doesn't try to stop, and she doesn't apologize. Instead, she waits, and I wait, and the tree waits, and we all wait under the pulsing blue sky.

She breathes in very slowly, finally recalibrating. “Amber knows about you. That you gave birth at the hospital and took off the next day.”

“Good.” I don't argue the point. I did come back once, to sign the papers and make it all official. I did hold that infant kid then.

“That you haven't stayed in touch. Not even a birthday card.” She glances at the school, back at me. “I've always just been clear
with her. No use in lying. Wouldn't know what to say anyway. This is her first week. School just started. She's got enough to worry about already.” She wipes her face with her forearm. “You homeless? Where are you staying?”

The yellow swings on the playground have ceased to move. They just hang there, useless, and I say, “It doesn't matter. I don't care. A tent. A car. I'm sorry I didn't call. I'm not really in a place where I can . . . I dunno, uh, think ahead. I don't have a phone, I don't have money to make a call, I have absolutely nothing, Libby. Nothing.” I squint at her, and then my eyes go back to the swings. “No-thing, nothing, n-othing, not-a-thing.” I singsong it to myself, a little hum, a little prayer, a little accusation to the universe. “Not-a-thing-at-all.”

Libby clenches her jaw, meaning she's hardening up and done with the tears. “I can't just—Tess. How high are you? How sick are you?” When she gets no answer, she adds, “I don't know if I want Amber to see you. Or you her. Or if I do, I'd like to prepare her, you know?” She stands and reaches her hand out to pull me up. “Although I don't know how to do that, prepare her to see you.”

I ignore her hand and stand up on my own, my knees aching with the effort of it. I scratch my arm, look at a yellow sweatshirt that has been abandoned by the chain-link fence. Wonder if it would fit me. Listen to some teacher inside clapping and guiding kids with
the wheels on the bus go round and round
, and their little voices chiming in. “I'll give them this much,” I say, nodding in their direction. “Their voices actually sound like blooms, yellow flowers, dancing in the air.”

She shakes her head no, sweeping my comment away. “How did you get here, anyway? You walked here from the highway? The gas station? Isn't that the Greyhound bus stop?”

“Indeed it is, and yes. I had the distinct pleasure of walking down the highway and through Mainstreet-NoWhere-Colorado with exactly one grocery, one post office, one closed-up movie theatre, one
church, one shitty city park, and one brick library, all the exact fucking same. This place is so poor, so dried up. I knew I'd eventually find you here. Boneknowledge.”

Libby runs her hand over her eyes, rubs her forehead. “Oh, Tess. That's too long of a walk. You must have been walking for hours. You don't have a backpack? Luggage?”

“Got not a single thing.” I don't tell her about my feet, which are bleeding inside my shoes, don't tell her about the inside of my throat, which is a desert, don't tell her about the inside of my stomach, a roiling burnache, and not my chest, which is a universe of spiraling stars.

“You sound crazy.” She tilts her head at me, considering this fact, and when I don't answer, she says, “Okay. I'm going to at least get you some food and water and a shower. I'm going to take you home. Just so you know, I'm married.” She clears her throat to get my attention, and so I look up. “I got married to Ed.”

“He still a hippie beekeeper? Still drive that orange VW bus around?”

“Yup.”

“Those cute little John Lennon glasses. I always figured he smoked a lot of pot.”

“As it turns out, no.”

“He's older than you.”

“We stayed friends for a few years until it became obvious. And by then, age didn't matter. He's been an excellent father to Amber. He's a good human being.”

“Deepgood? Heartsweeper?”

“Yeah.” She smiles a little at that. “I can see you're still inventing words.”

“You got other kids?”

She hesitates. “Nope. Amber has been enough.” She starts walking to her pickup, waves to me with her arm. “Well, come on, then. Crazy or not, I need to get you somewhere.”

I follow her. “Libby? We know how to reboot a computer. But is there a way to reboot a person? To start again?”

She shakes her head. “Cut it out, Tess. That's enough. I can't ever figure out if you're being earnest or a jackass. And neither can you. You have the capacity for the first, but you always fall into the second. I can't deal with that right now. I have to get to work. I can't take the day off, not this late. People depend on me. Even if I haven't seen my own sister for ten years. We have to figure something out.” But then she stops, turns to look at me, still unbelieving. “Please don't talk to me on the way. Just sit there, quiet. Just let me drive and get over the surprise of this. I just can't believe it. I just can't—”

“I can be quiet. Quiet like you would not believe.” I sound confident, but when I breathe out, there's the vibration of all the fear I've been housing. My ribcage moans in response, sore with the effort of this big of an exhale, of the travel and coughing, of the effort of having to house my messy heart. I want to buckle over with the heavypain of it. But at the exact same time, I know the vibration is also from lightrelief, because what if going home was a gal's lastditch effort? And if it didn't work, if she got shunned, she'd have to play the hand she's been carrying around in her back pocket as a last-resort option? And she can see that now she's at least got a bit of time before she uses that final tool in her extremely limited toolbox? I want to buckle under the relief of that, too.

I don't buckle. Instead I follow her like an obedient dog and climb in an old black Ford truck that has schoolbooks and a jump rope on the floor, a stack of mail on the dash, a cow's yellow eartag. Thank god. Thank some god for my sister, who seems to be willing to keep her heart open for at least a moment despite all the very good reasons not to, proving, I suppose, that we humans are kinder and more generous than whatever god struck us into life.

Chapter Three

The grasses in the fields run in waves alongside the truck, breathing
and moving together, a symphony, a cadence, a yellowdance. Like an ocean, and here we are, its pirates. That same wind makes my hair shift across my face, soft on my swollen jaw. We pass a group of heat-worn horses, standing exhausted. We pass round hay bales, an abandoned pickup truck, hot pastures that stretch on into the horizon. There's a bailer in another field, boxing up pastureland, and antelope in the far distance stand paused and surprised by life. It all looks exactly the same. Exactly like it did ten years ago when I first drove away, next to fields exactly like this, with my hair whipping around my face. I wonder what it is I've come back to be forgiven for. Perhaps knowing what I was about to do—and doing it anyway.