The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors (39 page)

Mary said, “We need to get off the beach. Come on.” The lightning played around them, pounding and sputtering and splitting the sky white.

Call a fucking ambulance, call a fucking ambulance
. The pop song in Becca’s head turned to
Treat the apparently dead. Treat the apparently dead first
. Becca straddled Buckley’s waist. With two fingers, she traced his bottom rib until she found that knot of cartilage. She was afraid. She counted two fingers up. With one hand on top of the other, she pressed down two inches deep into his chest.
One
, she counted.
Two, three, four
, and up to fifteen. She got off and pressed her mouth to his wet lips. One breath. Another breath. His lips were warm despite the rain, and she was methodical. Her mother pulled at the straps on Becca’s dress. “We have to get off the beach.” Becca pressed down and counted again. The ocean and sand melded white in a deafening blast. Becca’s mother shouted, “Becca! Becca!” but Becca heard,
Treat the apparently dead
first, and one, two, three, four … One breath. And another
. She counted and she breathed into Buckley’s mouth.

She heard the sound of her breath forcing its way into Buckley’s chest. She heard the five words over and over again:
Treat the apparently dead first
. As the lightning played around them, Becca’s mother pulled again on Becca’s dress and the yellow daisy shoulder straps tore loose. The straps were in Becca’s mother’s hands. Becca wouldn’t stop. She was Buckley’s heart. Paddy John grabbed Mary. The sky cracked open translucent violet. Paddy John saw Mary’s hair electrified about her face. Mary said, “Buckley’s dead. Buckley’s dead.” She remembered Bo: her daughter sopping wet, covering the body of a dead dog. “Becca, Buckley’s dead.”

Mary, breaking free from Paddy John, grabbed Becca’s right arm and her wrist. Becca pressed down on Buckley’s chest, turning to Paddy John, the old man dripping gray in the flashing light and darkness. She said, “Get her away from me.”

Becca breathed for Buckley. She pumped his heart.

The paramedics rushed the beach. Their orange pant legs swished in the dying rain. One of them cupped Becca’s body from behind, wrapping his arms around hers. He grabbed ahold of her wrists. She realized that her back ached. Her lips were numb. “That’s enough,” he said. “That’s enough. We got it.” The rain drip-dropped onto the beach. Lifting Becca up, he shouted over the dune, “We need two stretchers.”

“Don’t stop!” she screamed.

The paramedic held Becca against his chest.

“Don’t stop! He can’t die.”

The paramedic shouted, “Stat.”

Today was day four. Becca, her toes wrapped in white gauze, hobbled down the sunlit corridor of Norfolk General Hospital. The streams of light played on the patients’ hospital room doors like black and ivory piano keys, and Becca saw a blue-tipped angel flit across the tiles. With a squint, she saw that the blue-tipped angel was Carrie, a cardigan draped over her shoulders, the sleeves loose about her arms like wings.

In Becca’s room, the two friends lay on their backs, Carrie gonging her sandal heels into the metal bed frame. Becca unwrapping a piece of bubble gum, her freckled arms like two lightning rods above her head. Carrie’s heels gonged. The sun cast shadows of willow tree leaves on the beige hospital wall.

With good friends, with best friends, it’s all right to be quiet.

Flowers and cards, which had started arriving day one, crowded Becca’s hospital bureau. Her mother had phoned practically everyone in Becca’s address book to say, “I just thought you should know … Becca’s in the hospital. She’s been struck by lightning.” In addition to receiving a card and a bunch of daisies from Lucy and Jack, Becca got flowers from Paulo (with an attached note—
I can’t fucking believe you got struck by lightning! Your mom says you’re going to be fine. I miss you. Get well soon. Love, Paulo
) and a card from Sue of Sue’s Gallery (a standard get-well wish, despite the circumstances). And even her old boss Spencer
sent a ridiculous hospital gift-shop bear wearing a hat that read
GET WELL SOON
.

Aunt Claire and Uncle Tom sent yellow tulips and a card with a picture of Grandma Edna inside. After so many years, Becca still missed her Grandma Edna.

On the morning of day one, Becca swore she saw Grandma Edna leaning forward at the foot of her hospital bed, Edna’s freckled hands pressed into the white blanket. She said, “Buck up! Are you feeling all right? Of course you’re feeling all right. So, you won’t wear toenail polish for a while. So what!”

Becca said, “I miss you.” Mary was stroking Becca’s hair then, and the doctor said, “She’s fine. The painkiller in her IV’s pretty strong.”

Paddy John was there too, and he said, “I told you she’d be all right, Mare.”

Becca said, “Where’s Bo?”

Grandma Edna whistled. She said, “I have to go,” but she didn’t go right away, not before Bo leapt onto the bed.

“You’re a good boy,” Becca said, feeling the dog’s bristly snout at her cheek.

The doctor said, “The painkiller,” explaining Becca’s apparent hallucinations, and Mary said, “You’re going to be good as new,” stroking her daughter’s arm.

Grandma Edna smoothed the hospital blanket with her spotted hands, which smelled of some sort of fruit, and Becca fell asleep.

On day two, Rowan, who was testifying yet again, this time in Washington, D.C. (and who was not the first person Becca’s mother notified about the lightning strike), sent a lavender and gold orchid, a flower Becca would certainly kill trying to transport it back to New York.
The man has no common sense
, she thought as she tore open the card’s envelope. He had written:

She’d been a real waterfall since Buckley was struck, since her toes were burned, since the nurses filled her full of painkillers. That was the only explanation. She thought,
Goddamn him
, and then she cried.

On day three, she opened and closed her father’s card again and again. She’d like a big bright studio. It might be fun to go fishing or skiing. Maybe just a week or two—not long, and then, as if her mother’s voice filled her head, she thought,
It’s not too late. Not really. Not yet
. Maybe when he wrote that note her dad had thought the same thing. Besides, Colin Atwell had been hanging around, asking how she was, when he might see her.

When the doctor finally let Colin visit Becca, he said he hadn’t brought flowers because they die. Rather, he wanted to make a donation in her name to her favorite charity. “What’s your favorite charity?” He wanted to take her out to dinner when she felt better. If she was up to it. If she wanted to go. “Would you go out with me?”

She laughed at him. “Yeah, sure.” She liked the idea of dating someone who’d made his fortune in condoms, even if they weren’t the brand of condom she preferred. There was something horrifically honest about this man. Something that appealed to her.

Down the hall, Buckley had lost time. He’d lost Clementine, and he had only vague remembrances of a piggish man with a zucchini nose. He remembered the feel of his mother’s hand and the shine of her hair, and he remembered the New York Public Library and the Thin Man. No Martin Merriwether. He remembered how
to rig a tackle and bait a hook, and his neurologist, Dr. Nicholas Cave, said there was no way of knowing what memories would return. He still remembered Galveston, Charlie Zuchowski, Flamehead, and the nine-page Barbi Benton spread.

Buckley remembered Becca Burke.

He did not remember being struck by lightning.

He suffered third-degree burns on the bottoms of his feet and felt numbness in the right palm of his hand where the lightning made an exit wound. He knew that he would never feel the wet sand on the balls or soles of his feet the same way again, but he looked forward to sifting sand through his fingers. Like his mother, he loved the ocean.

Paddy John sat at Buckley’s bedside. “You’ll be coming home soon,” he said. He thanked God he hadn’t lost Buckley. Buckley
was
his son.

Buckley sipped Orange Crush through a straw. His dark hair was newly shorn, having been singed by the lightning, and he wore a hospital gown. He watched the TV mounted on the wall now and again—old episodes of
Bewitched
—and Becca sat at his waist on the bed. Her toes were still wrapped in gauze and her feet dangled.

Buckley said, “You’re supposed to keep them elevated.”

“I have a surprise for you.”

Colin Atwell, grinning, with his sleeves rolled up, his shirt untucked, entered Buckley’s hospital room. He carried with him
Fish, Number Fourteen
. Becca clapped. “Do you love it?”

Buckley reached out his ban daged hand, and Becca remembered that first night she and Buckley met, that rumpled man dripping rain, his arm outstretched, touching her painting.

Colin carried the canvas closer to the bed, and Buckley fingered the white-tipped black waves with his scarred hand. He said, “I love it. I do.”

Buckley saw his mother in there, in the paints. Not in the
gaping, dying fish suffering and littered on the beach, as you might imagine. No. Buckley saw his mother, Abigail, in the glossy dark waters and white foam, and he saw her higher up in each painted brushstroke. Oh, how she’d loved and sustained him. He saw and felt her there in the cracked, forgiving sky.