Red Lightning (6 page)

I remember one of the last times I saw him, when my stomach was huge and the baby was hooking her little toes under my lower rib and pushing, right before she'd turned, and right before I gave birth, and I'd gone into Ideal Foods to get some licorice and he was in there too, buying fruit, and we chatted for a moment. I barely knew him, only that he was the newly arrived hippie guy with the orange VW bus who was always talking philosophy in strange loopy sentences, the guy who sometimes walked with a strange gait, like he was skipping, and his hands dancing like a bird having some fun in the sky. He was more fragile then, somehow. Not firmed up. Not yet a man. But maybe on the verge, because I remember that day at the grocery store, he stood with me in the checkout line and told me that he wanted a Wordsworthian life, plain living and high thinking. I told him I wanted High Living and Plain Dying. He had chuckled and said, “Well, Tess, I hope that works out for you.”

                    
LISTEN (says one part of Tess's mind): Quit with this. Chin up.

                    
LISTEN (says another): Dying is part of living. High Living and Plain Dying is what you wanted.

                    
LISTEN (says another): Stop shaking, Tess. Bear up. For three days, do this thing.

Tess cries. She doesn't exactly want to go but also sees no other way out, and at least she has the sense to do it right.

                
No moldering corpse or bloody mess.

                
Alone. Plain bones.

                
East of here.

                
The universe doesn't care about us,

                
but we care about each other

                
and ourselves

                
and the whole enterprise of life,

                
especially at the moment of death.

                
When Death approaches,

                
it clarifies that need for a burst of caring at

                
the very end.

I take a big breath, dig my fingernails into my wrist, hard enough to streak pain, the pain strong enough to bring me back to my body.
Good girl
. It's just this: I never asked to suffer. I never meant to make other people suffer either. It wasn't
my fault
that I was born. So, no, god. You don't get to judge me for this. I don't forgive
you
.

Chapter Five

The heat is squawking now, an infant's wail demanding that the
clouds boiling up in the west sweep themselves across the sky. I look to the white blooms above the mountains to see their response. The clouds are reluctant, tired. They refuse. They want the earth to parch. Close up, though, a fluff of milkweed releases from its pod, over by the fence. The smooth white silk of it rises up, rests, and then is picked up in a gust of wind and sent into the pasture.

I am thirsty and hazy and sunsoaked and sunburned and dozing off when Ed pulls up again. He gets out of his truck and regards me silently while Ringo jumps from the truck, runs to nose me, and then runs back to him. Ed is not like the clouds. He is sure of himself. Direct. Here with a purpose. And sure enough, he walks over to a faucet hooked to a green hose and turns it on. I see the green hose jerk up, filled with water. He walks alongside it until he finds the end, which is at the base of a young apple tree, and now that I'm looking for them, I can see the pattern of newly planted fruit trees, too young to bear fruit but awaiting the possibility.

Ed stares at the hose, then picks it up, the water cascading down
near his feet. He drags the hose to another nearby tree, drops it, and walks back up the dirt driveway, away from me. Ringo darts in front of him, tail sweeping bits of sunlight, and lets out a single woof as a yellow bus pulls up, blinking its back-and-forth lights, and the stop sign swings out at the same time my throat constricts. Hilarious, that. A stop sign in the middle of nowhere. A grown heart terrified of a child.

I get to my hands and knees and stand up, slowly, to make sure the world is steady. The shower and cakebaking and sunsleeping have fragiled me—somehow I am less sturdy than I was this morning—and yet I must and will stand for this moment.

I watch Amber get off the bus, cross the dirt road, walk up to Ed. Turquoise T-shirt with a turquoise sweatshirt tied around her waist, bright red backpack, cascade of fine brown hair. Ringo circles her with joy, jabs her with his nose for a pet, circles again. Above her, I see the contrail of an airplane coming toward us, and I wish I'd been in one at least once, how wonderful to fly over strange moments like this.

Ed embraces Amber, waves to the bus driver, points to me, says something. As the bus pulls away, Amber starts walking. Looks up at Ed, asks a question. Stops again. Looks at me. Starts. Reaches down to pet Ringo, who is still circling her legs. The contrail starts to dissipate in the sky as she nears.

She stops to regard me fully for the first time. Her body sways back with surprise—I see her do it—and I'm doing it too. Heartcrunch. We've never seen how much we look alike. It is a new fact for the both of us. I feel my mouth open, hear my intake of a sharp breath.

“You're Tess.” She walks straight up to me but stops before she gets too close. Ed stops behind her, clears his throat, puts his hand on her shoulder. I can tell he's looking at me hard, but I keep my eyes on hers.

“You're Tess,” she says again.

“Yes.” I make a small arc with my hand. “You're Amber.”

She looks me up and down, fingers her silver stud earring. She's
got a round kid face with those adult teeth like ten-year-olds have, but she's pretty, with paler skin than me, but darker than her father, Simon, who in certain ways was so light and blond that he was like straw. She's tall for her age, with a little round tummy and no sign of hips or breasts yet, although, yes, she's wearing a thick shirt, which means the start of the coverup. Her eyes are beautiful. Almond shaped and dark liquid brown, and the glow of them will be her defining feature, the one that every boyfriend she's ever with will comment on, the one that will cause guys at bars to say,
Wow, you got some eyes there
. She's got my hair, which is a shade darker and a grade finer than Libby's. We stare at each other, and bygod, surely this similarity is in appearances only. She is not me. She will be the opposite of me.

“You were standing outside of school this morning.”

“Yes.”

“I saw my mom look at you.”

“Yes.”

“My dad says she knows you're here. That it's okay with her that I talk to you.” Her face is open and yet solid, matter-of-fact.

“Yes.”

“You look like the photos. Except skinnier and with short hair. We really do look a lot like each other, don't we?”

I make my eyes hold hers, but hers shift above my head, and I turn to see what she's looking at, which is a hawk circling on a current. I clear my throat. “We do, don't we? I didn't realize. You don't look like your father.”

“Simon?”

“Yes, Simon.”

“Who you had a one-night stand with?”

“It was a brief relationship. Don't you do that.”

“He died in a rodeo accident, you know.”

“I heard.”

“I wasn't sad. I barely knew him.”

“I hardly knew him either.” It's a rapid-fire exchange, no space in between the words, and finally there is a pause long enough that we can regard each other once again. She's biting her top lip in, and furrowing her brow, which makes her nose crunch. Her eyelashes are crazy-ass long, and she has peach-fuzz hair along her hairline and at the bend of her jaw, just like I do, and I wonder if I'm still a little bit high somehow because all these details sing out at me and my eyes can't unfocus from her face.

She inhales to start the next fast barrage. “Libby's my real mom, you know. You're not.”

“Oh boy, I know it.” My hands want to reach out, but instead I hold one wrist with one hand and place them against my belly. “I'm not here to argue that fact.”

“I'm not going to pretend to know you.” Her face grows a little harder. “I've seen pictures of you, but you've never seen me. That's a big difference between us.”

“True enough.”

“My dad warned me about your cheek. That it's puffy.”

“I got a tooth pulled the other day.”

“That's what he said. But otherwise, you don't look as bad as he said you did. The way he described you, I thought you might look like a zombie.” She shifts the backpack on her shoulder. “Well, that means something, you know. The fact that I know what you look like. But you didn't know about me. You didn't care enough to send an address so we could send you a picture of me. I did keep an extra of all my school pictures, in case you want them.”

I rub my hands over my arms, feel the prickles on my skin. “I do want the photos. Thank you.”

“You must be pretty mean.” She bites her lip and scrunches up her nose again. “I guess I'm glad you're here, though.”

“You are?”

“I'm not saying I
like
you. But I'm glad you're here, if only because I've wondered.
Of course
I am curious. Anyone would be curious. Anyway, why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you here?” But with that, she walks past me, into the house. I open the screen door, and I follow her in after glancing at Ed and seeing him shrug and nod. She stops, lets her backpack slide on the floor with a thump. Ringo sniffs it and runs to his bowl to lap up water. Ed follows us in but stays at the threshold of the door.

“I need to take something out of the oven,” I say. “I think it's a cake, but it might not be. Maybe it will be more like a large cookie.”

She eyes the golden circle as I take it out with mitts and upside-down it on a plate. She looks at it, worried, and then up at me. “It looks like a very fat pancake. It looks like some geographical formation you might find in Australia or something.”

I bark out a little laugh. She gets out the milk and a glass, pours herself some, considers, pours me a glass too. It's only then, while she's holding the heavy jug, I see that her hands are shaking. She's as scared as I am.

At the door, Ed clears his throat. “You want me to come in, honey? Or else I can go unload the bee boxes.”

“Do you want some milk, Dad? Some . . . cake?”

“No, but thank you. Later. I'll be right outside. You okay? Just tell me if you want me to make her leave. Or I can come in. You get to pick.”

She hesitates. “I'm okay. Take care of the bees.” She cuts herself a slice of the flat cake, feeds a crumb of it to Ringo, smiles at Ed. Then she squares her shoulders, turns to face me, and we stare at each other until we hear the slam of the screen door as Ed leaves. He looks back at us, and I can see that he'll be within earshot and plans on keeping it that way.

“The cake didn't fluff up.” I poke it with my finger. “It doesn't have enough air.” I look at her straight on. “Okay, I'm going to try to be honest. Why am I here? Well, thank you for asking, actually. I wanted to see you, Amber. I regret not . . . oh, about a million things. Not sending you birthday cards. I should have. I'm sorry about not living my life better. I want to say all the things you would expect. Clichés are sometimes clichés for a reason, you know? Because they're true. Anyway. It sounds cliché, but I want to say . . . that I'm very sorry. I hope you know that I didn't leave because of you personally. That is so true. I left because that was always my plan, always always always, and then I got pregnant. This place has been a bad match for me since I was a kid. I never wanted kids. Believe me, I would have been a shitty mom. Probably the shittiest mom ever to exist on the planet, and I knew it, and so I left. And then I just cut that part of my life off. Which is why I didn't send cards or anything. It just didn't
exist
. I have always joked that I was born without emotions. I'm not sure that's my fault. Probably it is. But certainly it isn't your fault. And yet you've had to live with the consequences of it. And for that I am sorry.” I take a breath and exhale. That's more or less how I practiced, and it is exactly the truth.

She takes a forkful, considers it for long enough that I know she's trying to calm emotions or form words. “That's what my mom says, that you would have been a bad mother,” she says at last.

“I knew Libby would make a better mother. At least I left you with a good woman.” I stab the fork into the golden fluff, lift out a forkful, put it on the right side of my mouth. “You okay? I'm not so okay. I feel nervous.”

Amber runs her fingers along the edge of her nose, not because of an itch, but because it's her way of manifesting a thought.