The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors (27 page)

If Buckley had decided to write a book about the Reagans, he might’ve discovered that his biological father currently worked for the Reagan administration, meeting on several occasions with
Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega. His father’s official title was hospitality liaison.

Because of Buckley’s organizational failings, the book was taking a long time to complete. Each time he read about another survivor, he revised the book.
I wish my mom had survived
.

To feel the weight of the typed pages excited him. It was incredible to produce something of substance. As the pages grew, he took to carrying the manuscript everywhere. On the subway, holding his green knapsack, the pages inside, he knew that his mother would be proud of his accomplishment.

Buckley wrote to Paddy John, confessing,
I might never finish
The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors.
Reading all the survivors’ stories makes me feel close to my mom
.

Paddy John wrote back,
You once wrote to me that your book could save someone’s life. I say finish it. Publish it. Stop dicking around, and put it out there
. He also wrote:
Tide is a mess. His grades are poor. I caught him smoking marijuana IN MY HOUSE
. Tide was nearly seventeen now—which was hard for Buckley to imagine.

Early mornings, before the clanking pipes and noisy radiators distracted him, Buckley worked on
The Handbook
or wrote letters to his friends in Galveston—Sissy and Joan, or Paddy in Wanchese. Even though Buckley had never liked the kid, he’d been a kid himself then, so he hated to hear that Tide was doing poorly.

With each letter from Paddy John, the news concerning Tide got worse: he was skipping school and drinking beer. Buckley didn’t pray, but he wished really hard that Tide would straighten up.

On Friday night after working the dinner shift, Buckley watched
The New York Nighttime Music Hour
, a public-access variety show featuring Kate Lovely, a Forty-second Street favorite, stripping to bagpipes. He sat there laughing, thinking,
Paddy John is right. Soon, very soon, I’ll give the book up. I’ll put it out there
. He leaned across
the couch, reaching for his knapsack. Pulling the pages out, he held them to his chest.
Soon
.

Two years later, in March 1986, Sycamore Press published one hundred copies of
The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors
. Buckley dedicated the book to his mother.

Mary sang. The house was empty except for her and the dog.

“I think I saw you in an ice cream parlour, drinking milk shakes cold and long, smiling and waving and looking so fine, don’t think you knew you were in this song …” In the kitchen she twirled, her red A-line dress opening like a flower. She tapped her heels against the floor tiles. She loved her job.

She did not have to work. Rowan was incredibly wealthy, having developed fourteen different cigarette additives for Atkins and Thames, none of them as lucrative as his first additive, QR66, but he was financially set for life, and John Saltz, Mary’s lawyer, made sure that she and Becca saw a large chunk of Rowan’s fortune. There was no disputing his extramarital affairs. Mary had known from the onset that Rowan wouldn’t raise the issue of fidelity in a public courtroom. He wouldn’t have his name dragged through the mud. The settlement was weighty and quick.

Slipping her heels off, Mary settled in an old recliner. She tapped the points of her shoes together. She’d found her niche: It was teaching poetry—her first love. It was Browning, Keats, Byron, and Ginsberg! It was Auden and Ashberry! It was wonderful. Leaving her shoes in the den, she sashayed to the garage. Digging through cardboard boxes of college textbooks, dusty paperbacks, and literary essays, she remembered Dr. Carver telling her, “You know your stuff, no doubt about it” and “Even if you sometimes
come across as ditzy, it doesn’t matter because you’re smart. You’re the reason men break down.” She remembered liking herself, telling her father she was leaving Prospect and she never wanted to see him again. Late at night, she’d applied to one college after another, paying the application fee with money she’d saved and stashed beneath her bed. She remembered, having earned a full scholarship, taking the bus from Farmville to Chapel Hill. She was seventeen.

Among her books, Mary found her first publication, an essay on Kate Chopin’s
The Awakening
. She’d been so proud, fruitlessly sending copies to her parents—who didn’t call or respond. What had she expected?

Dr. Carver had commented, “You don’t go home for holidays.”

“My parents died.”

Dr. Carver was three times her age, and she loved him. There is solace in poetry. There is solace in art. Mary was nostalgic. She felt happy—an unusual and wonderful thing to be.

Then she found an old notebook, the pages yellowed and scrawled with black ink. She had her father’s handwriting.

She was sixteen, attending Prince Edward Academy. (There was no public school, as to avoid integration.) She’d been to see the movie
It Happened One Night
at the drive-in. She’d gone alone. She loved Clark Gable.

When she got home, her father was waiting with his belt. Mary felt for the buckle scar on her lower back.

She turned the pages in the old notebook, remembering the poem she’d written that night, wanting to read it again but not wanting to remember the rest—her father in pursuit, shouting, “You broke curfew!”; hearing the leather slip from his belt loops and the clack of buckle against the plaster wall; feeling the buckle strike her back, the burn of blood rising to the surface. Her room wasn’t close enough. She wasn’t going to make it. She fell, and the buckle had come down again, but the first hit had been the charm.

She turned the pages. There was nothing to fear. Not anymore.

She smiled, remembering how she nightly wished him dead. He never got the best of her.

Mary’s mother lived in that space between Mary and her dad. Her hands had smelled like baked pears and Mary swore she could smell those hands now—just a whiff.

Mary remembered her dad pressing one boot on the back of her thigh, pressing her chin into the floor with his left hand. She’d stifled the tears. Without her permission, some fell anyway—a response to pain, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

He said, “This is my house. My rules. You break curfew, you pay.”

There was no point in trying to explain that she couldn’t miss the movie’s happy ending. She adored Clark Gable: so charming and suave.

An hour later, her mother had knocked at her bedroom door. It was late. Mary’s father was asleep. Her mother brought baked pears and warm milk.

“I’m not hungry,” Mary had said.

“He doesn’t mean it.”

Mary took her notebook into the kitchen, the pear aroma staying with her. She fixed a Jim Beam and Coke. Her hands were aged now; brown spots mingled with freckles. It was funny to see them this way, reminding her of her mother.

My mother loved me
. Mary sipped from the sweating glass and cried.

Her mother would say, “There’s no sense crying over spilled milk or bourbon and Coke.”

Craving a jar of her mother’s pear preserves, Mary fixed a grape jelly sandwich. A lot of the women at the Dogwood Estates retirement center, where she now taught poetry, were like her mother—
stubborn and ornery, remembering their lives as well lived, as good, and hell
, Mary thought,
they ought to remember them that way
. She sipped from her glass.
Who wants to be old and full of regret? Who wants to be old and sorry for the life she’s lived? Who wants to be eighty and thinking “I shouldn’t have done that. I wish I could take that back.”
Her mother would say, “Regret the things you haven’t done, not the things you have. Learn from life. Live every day as though it’s your last.”
God
, she thought,
my mother was full of clichés
. Mary finished her drink. Smoothing a page in the old notebook, she wrote:
It’s never too late to make peace with the world
.

After one year, the pantry was piled with warped canvases of unfinished nudes and still lifes and oils never left to dry.

Christopher Lord, Becca’s professor, met her for pizza on Bleecker Street. Becca called him Apple Pie in spite of his steel-studded leather jacket and his get-in-free card at CBGB’s. She called him Apple Pie because of his wife and two kids on Long Island. Because of his board memberships and tenure—something her father had never managed.

Across the table, he squeezed her hand.

She said, “This is the sketchbook I was telling you about.” She called it “
Mon Histoire
, My History.” She felt the need to share it with him, wanting his approval. There were charcoal and oil pastel depictions of Grandma Edna, pen-and-inks of the woman selling watermelon in Yeatesville, of her dad in Barnacle Bob’s, of her mom on the kitchen floor. There was a pencil drawing of Kevin Richfield.

He flipped quickly through the pages. “When did you do these?”

“Last year, when I first got to SVA.”

“Don’t show them to anyone. They’ll think you shouldn’t be here.”

It was cruel.

“Who’s the old lady?”

“My grandmother.”

“It’s so commonplace, Becca.” He was disappointed.

Becca didn’t eat anything. After Apple Pie finished his third slice of pizza, they went back to her place. They drank the wine he’d brought. They had sex-sex. Apple Pie could last until he was sure she’d climaxed. He liked to yank her red curls, pressing her naked against the exposed bricks. She liked it too. She was falling hard for him.

Every Friday after Apple Pie’s two o’clock studio class, he went to Becca’s loft. She promised not to tell anyone about the affair, although she did tell Jack and Lucy—her neighbors and closest friends in New York, and for some reason, though she felt compelled to confide in her mom, she didn’t.

In Chapel Hill, Mary quit smoking.

Despite profiting from Rowan’s work for Atkins and Thames, she didn’t want to line his or his whore wife’s pockets with any more cigarette money. She quit cold turkey by pretending (to herself) that she had emphysema. (She also pretended to have emphysema with the boy who bagged her groceries and a cashier at the Rite-Aid.) Claire said on the telephone, “That’s a strange, deceitful way to quit,” but, thrilled that Mary did so, she added, “Whatever works.”

Carrie majored in economics at UNC Chapel Hill, and Mike worked construction for his dad’s company. They got engaged. Mike’s mother, twice divorced, gave him one of her old wedding rings.

As for Whiskers, he waited for Becca’s return. She’d spent the night away before. He knew she’d be back. He waited on her bed.

Months passed. He waited. Every time the front door opened, he ran to meet her. He paced the purple flower rug, and Mary didn’t have the heart to tell her daughter (who was finally free of Chapel Hill) that the dog’s heart was broken—that he was waiting for a ghost of a girl, a girl who would never return.

Mary tried cheering him up. She took Whiskers for morning walks, and she took him to work. He wagged his tail, seeming to perk up, but every time Mary took him home again, he went to Becca’s bed and waited. Finally, Mary shut him out of Becca’s room and he lay with his salt-and-pepper back pressed against her door. Mary tried to coax him into her own bed, but nothing doing. He was waiting on Becca.

Fourteen months after Becca’s departure, Mary found Whiskers, his salt-and-pepper back pressed against Becca’s bedroom door, dead.

The vet ruled Whiskers’ death congestive heart failure, but Mary knew the truth: a broken heart.

Becca was in the throes of Apple Pie then. She hadn’t called home in a good while, and when Mary telephoned New York with the sad news, Becca wept.

She met Apple Pie outside his office door. He was with colleagues. She said, “I need to talk to you.” It was obvious she’d been crying.

He said to his colleagues, “She’s upset about her grade.”

“Please, can I talk to you?”

“I don’t budge on grades. I’ve explained this. Art is subjective. Consider me the audience for
all
work while you’re enrolled in my class.”

One of Apple Pie’s colleagues patted him on the back before they left Becca crying in the hallway.

You might think Becca would toss Apple Pie aside, but she’d grown accustomed to the men she most revered discarding her like garbage. She was a smart girl, but some lessons are hard, taking years to learn, and even more years to master.