The Truth About Love and Lightning Read online

  The Truth About Love and Lightning

  Susan McBride

  Dedication

  To the newest love of my life, Emily Alice, who has proven without a doubt that lightning can strike twice and miracles do exist

  Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  The Twister

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  The Gift

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  The Ghost

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Seeds

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Faith

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Choices

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  The Truth

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  An Excerpt from In the Pink

  Introduction

  Books and Boys . . .

  One

  P. S.: Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Praise for the books of Susan McBride

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Annika Brink could not tell a lie.

  From as far back as Gretchen could remember, her mother had been unable to utter anything but the cold, unvarnished truth—or, at least, the truth according to Annika—and, as Gretchen learned quickly enough as a child, often the truth set no one free and was downright painful besides.

  As when the twins were born when Gretchen was five. “They are not right,” Annika had insisted, her pale hair wild and hands on her hips, such a ferocious frown on her lips that it looked as though she might want to take them back to the county hospital posthaste.

  Which had Gretchen wondering if one could return babies the same way one returned a glass bottle drained of soda to the grocer’s for a nickel.

  “Do you not see what I see?” Annika had nagged her very tolerant husband.

  “They look fine to me,” Gretchen’s father had replied, and he’d bent over the double-wide crib to first rub Bennie’s belly and then Trudy’s. “They’ve each got ten fingers and ten toes, a perfect button nose, and ears like tiny seashells.”

  “Then you are as blind as they are,” Annika had bluntly stated. “Look at their eyes! They’re such a milky blue, and neither so much as blinks when I pass my hand before them. Do you think it’s my fault, for painting while I was pregnant?” she had asked, madly pacing. “Was it the fumes from the oils or the turpentine? As an artist, I can’t imagine a more horrible curse than to lose one’s sight!”

  “Oh, I can think of plenty,” Gretchen’s father had coolly replied, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the crib’s railing. “Would you cast out a calf because it couldn’t see, when its milk will be no different than a cow with sight?”

  “Please!” Annika had loudly and dismissively snorted. “I know you believe animals are like people because you spend more time with beasts than humans,” she’d told him, “but these are our daughters, not barnyard creatures!”

  For a long moment, Gretchen had shut out their voices. She’d heard them argue enough before about her father’s job as a farm veterinarian, how it kept them in Walnut Ridge when Annika found so much about small-town life uncultured and unfit.

  Instead, Gretchen had crept toward the bars of the crib and peered through as if staring at a pair of sleeping monkeys at the zoo. If there was something wrong with her new sisters, she couldn’t see it from where she stood.

  “C’mon, Anni, enough.” Her father had expelled a weary sigh. “Nothing’s your fault. Nothing’s anyone’s fault. Sometimes things just happen, and no one’s to blame. If it’s not life or death, we’ll get through it.”

  “They will never have normal lives.”

  “Normal is overrated,” he’d declared, shaking his head. It was a minute before he seemed to realize Gretchen was there beside him, her upturned face full of worry. “Better to be different, don’t you think, sweet pea?” he had said, his voice suddenly lighter as he ruffled her bright yellow curls. “That’s how you make your mark. Not by being the same as everyone else.”

  But Gretchen had not agreed. Her mother’s words had her frightened.

  “What will happen to them?” she’d asked and had slipped a small hand through the crib rails to poke tiny Trudy. She was no bigger than a pot roast, although pot roasts didn’t drool in their sleep. “We’ll keep them, won’t we?”

  “Of course we’ll keep them,” Daddy had told her, squatting down at her side. “They’re your sisters, and we love them. Everything will be fine.”

  Annika had groaned. “How can you tell her that in all good conscience? Because you can’t possibly know. You’ve never been blind. Neither of us can be sure of what will become of them.”

  “They have us to protect them,” her daddy had said with a nod. “That’s all that children need.”

  “But what happens when we die? Who will they have then?” her mother had cried. “We have no family anywhere near.”

  “Me,” Gretchen had said quietly as her fingers reached for Trudy’s dimpled elbow. “They’ll have me. I won’t let anything happen to them, Mommy. I promise.”

  And Gretchen had meant it.

  The twins were eventually diagnosed as legally blind, their sight limited to discerning shadows and shapes, darkness and light. But there was nothing positive about their situation in Annika’s eyes. When they went into town to visit the shops on Main Street, Annika would push Trudy and Bennie up the sidewalk in the double stroller and Gretchen would walk a few steps behind, peering into windows and listening to her mother bluntly answer those who asked, “How are your darling babies?”

  “They are as blind as bats,” she’d tell them, sounding as if it were the kiss of death. “I hope we can keep them with us and won’t be forced to send them to an institution.”

  Gretchen usually tried to remain silent and not challenge anything Annika said, but with each passing year, she had found it harder and harder not to chip in her two cents. “Bennie can hear the postman coming way before I can see him,” she had finally dared to rebut, “and Trudy knows every spice in the rack by scent alone.”

  “Is that so?” Annika had said, her pale eyes narrowed.

  “It is,” Gretchen had replied and had managed not to flinch, even though she knew it wasn’t precisely the truth, merely a candy-coated lie. Bennie could hear things before anyone else, and Trudy could identify countless items by their smell alone.

  Her sisters were special, Gretchen knew, regardless of what their mother believed, and she was determined to prove that they had no limitations.

  So as the twins had grown, Gretchen had been their shepherd, watching over her sheep. She took them by their hands when they were old enough to walk, teaching them where every stick of furniture sat in the house, where every tree grew outside, where every step or gate or wall existed. Even more important, she reminded them over and over again that they were no less for not having eyeballs that worked like everyone else’s.

  “Maybe your gifts are in your other senses,” she would tell them, and Bennie and Trudy would smile their precious smiles as if such a thing seemed perfectly reasonable.

  When Gretchen was in the fifth grade, she
learned that the school librarian, Miss Childs, had grown up with a blind mother and knew Braille well enough to instruct Bennie and Trudy. Miss Childs also took the liberty of ordering them Braille textbooks and such. Soon Gretchen’s father asked the librarian outright if she’d become the girls’ private tutor. She did such a good job with the twins that Annika ceased uttering the word institution, and Gretchen’s father seemed happier just having the very agreeable Miss Childs around.

  By the time Gretchen was in high school, Bennie and Trudy had blossomed into capable young ladies, able to do all the things that Gretchen did around the house: dress themselves, tie bows in their hair, make their beds, clean their rooms, sweep the porch, and even climb the lowest branches of the maple tree out front. Thanks to Miss Childs, both girls were reading well beyond their grade level. Indeed, Gretchen’s father had become so fond of their tutor that he’d left to drive her home one day and had never returned.

  I’m sorry, Anni—had read the note he’d left behind—but I can’t handle so much truth anymore. Sometimes ignorance is truly bliss, and what I need is more bliss in my life.

  Her mother had cried on Gretchen’s shoulder, asking her, “Am I so horrible to be around? Am I that unlovable?”

  Instead of being honest, Gretchen had told Annika what she knew her mother had wanted to hear, words cribbed from Wanton Wild Love, the romance novel she was in the midst of reading, tucked upstairs beneath her pillow. “Miss Childs was nothing but a temptress, Mother, a seductress out to lure away what belonged to another.”

  “Do you truly think so?”

  “I do,” she said, even though Miss Childs looked nothing like the half-naked woman with flowing red hair on the book’s torrid cover. In her prim sweater sets and too-long skirts, with her plain brown hair and bespectacled eyes, Miss Childs had appeared the very stereotype of what she was: a school librarian. Still, Gretchen’s lie seemed to make Annika feel better, so what was the harm?

  It would not be the first nor the last time she fibbed to her mother.

  The year her father left, during the summer before her senior year in high school, when Gretchen lost her virginity to a questionable young man and wound up pregnant, she lied to her mother again. Only that particular lie was different. That lie was a lot like her belly: it just kept growing and growing until it created a life all its own.

  The Twister

  And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth,

  even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

  —REVELATIONS 6:13

  One

  April 2010

  Bam bam bam!

  Loose shutters banged against the house, pounding the clapboards like angry fists as the wind kicked up and howled around the eaves, drawing Gretchen Brink to the half-opened window above the kitchen sink.

  A minute earlier, the sky had been a pristine blue, the April sun showering warmth upon the walnut farm while a gentle breeze ruffled the leaves of the just-bloomed peonies below the sill. Out of nowhere, fierce gusts forced their way through the window screen, batting at Gretchen’s hair and stirring up the scent of rain and the rumble of thunder. Beyond her pale reflection in the glass, the sky turned black as pitch and a startling crack rent the air. A great boom followed as a bolt of lightning hit, causing her to see stars and jarring the floor beneath her feet.

  “Good heavens,” she said as goose bumps leaped across her flesh.

  As quickly, the air turned an eerie shade that seemed a cross between gray and yellow. Some might call it green, but Gretchen could only describe it as menacing. Thunder crashed, rattling the glass. She jumped away as a downpour began to pelt the panes, blurring her line of sight, but not before she watched a gnarled branch ripped from a full-grown maple and hurled across the lawn as if made of feathers.

  “Someone’s angry,” she said, rubbing the gooseflesh on her arms and wondering what had nature so riled up that it wrested branches from trees and tossed about everything that wasn’t fastened down.

  “Gretchen! We must get to the cellar this instant,” the elder of her twin sisters, Bennie, declared as she came up from behind, hands outstretched as she felt her way into the room, the creaking floor announcing her every step. Bennie stopped before a high-backed chair and tightly grasped it, tilting her head toward the ceiling though her milky eyes stayed downcast. “Can’t you hear it?” Her round face grew grim. “It’s close, and it’s coming straight at us.”

  “What’s coming toward us? I can’t hear anything above the wind,” Gretchen said and tensed just the same, because what she could hear didn’t matter. Bennie might have been blind since birth, but she had ears like a bat. She could sense impending disaster more accurately than a meteorologist’s Doppler radar.

  “A twister,” Bennie said quite plainly, and her chin began to quiver. “It’s dropped right out of the sky very near, and it’s on its way. We’re dead in its path.”

  “Where’s Trudy?” Gretchen asked, trying hard not to panic.

  She knew good and well that tornadoes didn’t mess around, not when they plowed through tiny Missouri towns, and Walnut Ridge was about as tiny as they came. A twister’s only job was to make a mess of all it touched. They had been lucky these thirty-nine years since her Abby was born, the bumpiest weather seeming to miraculously bypass the farm, but maybe their luck had run out.

  “Trudy!” Gretchen began to shout, heading for the dining room as the thunder and shrieking winds shook the house. “Trude, where are you?”

  “I’m here,” the younger twin called back, appearing beneath the curve of the arch separating dining room from kitchen.

  Trudy looked the mirror image of Bennie: round head fringed with faded brown stuck atop a thin neck and slight frame, with slender arms and legs far stronger than they appeared. She was forever clad in cotton smocks with ample pockets to carry odds and ends, like tissues, bits of string, and treats for her cat, Matilda. In fact, at that very moment, she clutched Matilda to her breasts, not about to let her go, despite how the hairless feline wiggled and squirmed.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” Trudy said, scurrying toward Gretchen as another boom of thunder shook the tiny farmhouse. “I can smell the change in the air. It reeks of anguish and unfinished business.”

  “Bennie says a twister’s headed straight for us, and she’s never been wrong.”

  “No, she’s never wrong,” Trudy grimly agreed.

  And Trudy’s nose had never been wrong either.

  Matilda mewed, her pale skin stretching over her skeletal body as she climbed toward Trudy’s shoulder. Gretchen took her sister’s arm and hurried her through the kitchen and to the stairs, descending behind Bennie, whose heavy clogs clip-clopped down the steps.

  “It’s so dad-gummed dusty, like I’m breathing in the musty scent of every soul who’s ever lived here,” Trudy remarked and sneezed, losing a startled Matilda from her shoulder in the process. The tiny feet padded lickety-split into the cellar and out of sight.

  “It’s a hundred-year-old basement, Trude,” Bennie said, her voice made hollow by the stone walls surrounding them. “It’s practically made of dust.”

  At the top of the stairs, Gretchen shut and latched the door for good measure before she trailed the twins belowground, to where the dirt floors and rock walls were lit only by a single sixty-watt bulb. She found the flashlight she kept at the base of the steps, switching it on just as the electricity flickered and went out.

  Though she paused in the darkness as she swung the beam of the flashlight to guide her, her sisters didn’t hesitate in the least. They had no need for light to lead them. They knew every inch of the old house tactilely. They hadn’t grown up inside its walls, but they’d been living within them for nearly as long as Gretchen. She’d moved them in with her four decades ago when she was barely eighteen and they were just thirteen, once she’d inherited the place from Lily and Cooper Winston, a year after she’d given birth to Abby. “Sam would want his daughter
to grow up here, nowhere else,” Lily had insisted, and Gretchen had not disagreed. Just as the home had been a cozy nest for Sam Winston and two generations of his family before him, it had quickly become Abby’s and Gretchen’s home-sweet-home as well.

  Dear Sam, God rest his soul.

  The place still rightly belonged to him as far as Gretchen was concerned, but she’d stopped feeling guilty for being there. She loved it as deeply as anyone could, and every inch of it was a constant reminder of him and how his selflessness had saved her.

  She told herself that caring for the farm as much as she did was repayment enough for her betrayal, even if she wasn’t entirely convinced.

  “It’s at the fence line already,” Bennie said, interrupting Gretchen’s thoughts.

  “And it’s getting closer.”

  The three of them settled into a tiny room with rounded walls where a trio of metal folding chairs awaited them.

  Bennie reached for Trudy’s hand and clutched it. “Oh my, it’s barreling up the front drive. Can you feel it shake the ground?”

  “Oh my, oh my, oh my,” Trudy echoed.

  Gretchen didn’t feel the ground move so much as she felt Matilda padding back and forth between her ankles. The noise of the wind was less fierce underground and still she heard a high-pitched keening, angry and insistent.

  As she settled into the tight circle with her sisters, a loud pop rent the air, and then a crash that made the small house shudder. Gretchen dropped the flashlight from her hands, and it clattered somewhere near her feet.

  Matilda hissed as if telling her, “Watch where you put that thing!”

  “Please, Lord, protect us,” Trudy whispered, and Gretchen reached for her sisters’ hands, grabbing on when she connected; all of them were trembling.

  Please don’t let us die down here, and I swear I’ll never tell another lie. Gretchen squeezed her eyes closed and prayed, though she didn’t entirely mean it.