The Truth About Love and Lightning Read online

  Gretchen wandered through the dining room, the front hall, and the parlor, making sure all was safe. Thankfully, framed embroidery and mirrors still hung on the walls, the windows appeared intact—albeit muddied by wet leaves—and the ceiling sported no new stains, merely cracks in the plaster that had been there for an eternity.

  “The house seems to have held together,” she called out as she walked toward the kitchen, Matilda nearly tripping her as the cat howled and ran past her, heading for the back door.

  “I hope the shutters stayed on,” Trudy said, fingers reaching into cupboards that held the china cups that had once been their mother’s, while Bennie filled the kettle at the sink. “If anything’s broken, we’ll have to call Walter.”

  She said it so eagerly that Bennie teased, “You’re sweet on the handyman, are you, Trude?”

  “Go on, you!” Trudy said, giggling.

  “Well, I don’t figure we’ll need Walter for the shutters anyway,” Bennie announced as she shut off the faucet and moved the kettle to a burner. “I didn’t hear them do anything but bang, and Gretchen wouldn’t have let us up if any windows were broken, would you, sweet?”

  “Not a chance,” she told her sister, “but I haven’t checked the upstairs so you girls stay down here until I do.”

  “You won’t find anything wrong with the house but bumps and bruises,” Bennie said matter-of-factly as she fingered the knobs on the gas stove and got the proper burner lit with a pop and a hiss. “I believe we’ve survived intact despite Mother Nature’s reminder of who’s in charge.”

  “Strange,” Trudy said and stopped setting cups on saucers to lean toward the half-opened window above the sink, her nose wrinkling like a bunny’s. “I caught a strong whiff of lemongrass just now. I haven’t breathed that scent since . . . well, a long time ago. You know who that reminds me of, Gretch—”

  “Yes, I know,” she said, cutting Trudy off, because her sister had often remarked that Sam Winston smelled of “truth and lemongrass.” The funny thing was, Gretchen had been thinking of Sam, too. She couldn’t help it, not with the way the storm had kicked up and blown through.

  “Perhaps it’s an omen,” Trudy added.

  “I hope it’s a good one,” Gretchen replied, her mouth dry.

  “Me, too.”

  But as Gretchen walked toward the window that faced the front drive, she didn’t feel very hopeful. Though the house appeared to have withstood the twister’s winds without damage, the rest of the property had not. Branches littered the lawn and the gravel drive; leaves had been stripped from standing trees. Farther off in the distance, she discerned black power lines and telephone cables that should have crisscrossed the sky but no longer stretched from pole to pole. Instead, they sagged like old clothesline. Despite the sun’s attempt to peek between scudding gray clouds, the aftermath was hardly heartwarming. It looked an awful lot like a battlefield.

  Gretchen set aside the flashlight and went straight to the old Bakelite phone. Picking up the receiver, she put it to her ear and listened for a dial tone. “Hello?” she said, tapping on the reset buttons. “Hello?” she tried again, putting a finger in the rotary dial and giving it a spin.

  She heard nothing.

  “The phone’s dead,” she announced.

  “Nuts.” Bennie sighed and felt her way along the counter, pausing at the stove and waiting for the teakettle to whistle. “Though I don’t feel much compelled to call into town at the moment, it’s not very reassuring that I couldn’t reach anyone beyond the fence if I wanted to.”

  “You never did get that cell phone Abby gave you working, Gretch, did you?” Trudy asked.

  “I couldn’t get a signal.” Gretchen sighed. Nothing wireless seemed to function on the farm, and they’d tried plenty of times to get connected. But they’d given up the idea of laptops or cells once they realized it was futile. One frustrated wireless technician had suggested there was something magnetic in the air interfering with the signals, and Gretchen could only imagine what that was, maybe the spirits that Abby had always blamed for anything odd that happened on the farm while she was growing up. Like when the doorbell rang but there was no one there, or when the lights mysteriously turned on and off, as though communicating in an otherworldly Morse code.

  “I’m sure they’ll be out to repair things in no time. We’ll be fine,” she reassured her sisters, a false promise to be sure as they were five miles outside town and often the last in line to get attention. “If you two will stay put, I’ll venture out and see what else needs fixing.”

  That said, Gretchen headed toward the back door, located her knee-high rubber boots, and plopped down on the bench to remove her sneakers and pull the boots on.

  Matilda pushed past her legs as Gretchen opened the mudroom door and stepped out onto the rear porch. She let the screen door slap closed behind them.

  As she ventured onto the lawn, the first thing that struck her was the scent of the earth, damp and loamy, and the starchy smell of a freshly scrubbed sky. She heard the drip-drip of water, sluicing off the roof and tree branches, errant sprinkles splashing her cheeks like teardrops. Birds began to twitter from above, emerging from their hiding places to inspect the world poststorm.

  Ignoring the twigs and limbs strewn about, Gretchen focused on the old farmhouse, walking steadily around it, taking in the whitewashed clapboards above the stone foundation. Two loose shutters hung cockeyed on their hinges, but otherwise she didn’t spot anything dangerously amiss. The soles of her thick rubber boots crunched on ground that felt uneven, like a carpet of nettles.

  As she rounded the corner, a voice called out from the kitchen window, “Gretch? Everything okay out there?”

  “It’s a bit of a mess but nothing too bad so far,” she replied as the sash creaked wider and Trudy’s face appeared behind the screen.

  “Bennie wondered if a tree fell in front,” Trudy said. “She felt the ground shudder so she thinks it might be a big one. You should check that out,” she suggested before the sash came down so the window was open only a crack.

  If Bennie thinks a tree fell, then a tree fell, Gretchen mulled as she went around the front to find all the wicker tossed into a heap on the porch. She started up the steps, compelled to right everything, but Matilda appeared out of nowhere, weaving around her ankles. The cat’s hairless tail was raised like a flagpole and anxiously twitched.

  Matilda howled, and Gretchen bent to scratch the cat’s wrinkled head. “I know, girl,” she said, “Everything’s a smidge topsy-turvy, but it’ll be okay.”

  Then Matilda did something she’d never done before: she opened her mouth and bit Gretchen’s hand. Not hard enough to break the skin, but enough to leave fresh tooth marks.

  “Hey!” Gretchen stood and rubbed the spot on her palm.

  “Mew!” Matilda mournfully cried, her ghostly form pacing back and forth. “Mew!”

  The cat appeared possessed, her blue eyes staring up with such purpose that Gretchen instinctively took a step after her as Matilda sprang off the porch and raced toward the walnut grove. Only Gretchen had promised Trudy she’d see about the fallen tree, and that she would do first.

  “Sorry, girl,” she called to Matilda’s fleeing backside, and she headed toward the graveled drive, finding more branches down and more debris scattered across the lawn. Well ahead, she made out gaps in the line of fence where some of the railroad ties had been knocked down.

  “Damn,” she let slip, pausing with hands on her hips, figuring at least Trudy would be pleased that she’d definitely need a hand from Walter to pick things up and put them back together again.

  Gretchen kept walking, boots slogging through the muddied gravel, the high humidity making her feel like a damp dishrag. She’d barely gone half a mile toward the dirt road when she saw something that provoked an involuntary groan.

  Oh, no.

  Dead ahead lay a mammoth shape, like a dinosaur collapsed on its side. A pit formed in her belly, a terrible sadness. For
Gretchen knew it wasn’t a napping T. rex but the hundred-year-old oak that had stood sentry at the entry point to the Winston farm forever. Her chest ached to see it. It was akin to a death in the family.

  The oak had been ripped from the ground, its roots protruding at the base, the ground gaping beside it. Boughs that had once touched the sky now seemed sprung from the earth, extending over fifty feet and blocking the mouth of the drive entirely so that no car could get through. Gretchen certainly couldn’t get her truck out. With the phone lines down and no ingress to the farm, the tornado had done a bang-up job of cutting them off from the rest of the world. Somehow, she felt as if it had done that on purpose.

  “It’ll take Sheriff Tilby and his boys a week to cut that up and haul the pieces away,” she said aloud, and Matilda suddenly reappeared beside her, meowing her concern.

  Gretchen drew in a deep breath and let it out, willing the worry out of her chest. She reminded herself that if that was the worst of it, they’d gotten off easy. She knew folks who’d endured twisters dismantling barns, homes, and silos, killing animals and family alike. Compared to that, a fallen oak was nothing.

  “C’mon, cat, let’s get on in,” she said and turned to head back toward the house.

  Only Matilda had other ideas. The bony feline dashed in front of her, tripping up Gretchen and nipping at the toes of her rain boots. Gretchen shooed her off, but she persisted, howling in such a guttural way, like a spirit possessed. It made Gretchen’s hair stand on end.

  “Okay, Lassie, what’s up? Has Timmy fallen in the well?” she asked the cat, and Matilda ceased howling, shooting Gretchen a soul-searing stare before she took off, again running toward the walnut grove.

  Rather than ignore the frantic feline, Gretchen went after her, noticing along the way how the grass had been flattened; no, not just flattened, but swirled as in crop circles, the blades bent so that they seemed a different green entirely from the rest of the grass on either side. It was as though the tornado had created a path toward the grove, after barreling into the oak in front, curving away from the house and past the weathered barn.

  At least the twister couldn’t do much real damage in the grove, Gretchen realized, since the trees had been barren since before Abby was born. They had stopped producing fruit shortly after the grim-looking pastor from the Presbyterian Church had shown up on the Winstons’ front porch to tell them Sam had disappeared from the humanitarian aid camp in Africa and was presumed dead. The fellow had given them a plastic bag with a few of Sam’s personal effects: his bound passport, the black comb he forever carried in his back pocket, a battered Hemingway novel, and a photograph of Gretchen so manhandled the color had nearly washed away.

  Gretchen had been with Lily and Cooper Winston on that fateful afternoon, her belly ripened just enough to get the town’s gossips squawking. She realized Sam’s parents suspected their son might be the baby’s father, considering the longtime friendship between Gretchen and Sam. But once Gretchen witnessed the devastation on their faces as they were informed that Sam was missing and likely dead, she couldn’t help the words that had spilled out of her mouth.

  “Sam isn’t gone, not entirely,” she’d told them, pushing herself out of the rocking chair and standing before them, cradling her tiny bump. “He’s left part of himself behind. I wanted him to be the one who told you, but since he can’t, I’ll speak for him now.”

  “Did he know about the baby before he left?” the usually stoic Lily had asked through her tears.

  “Yes, he knew,” Gretchen said, relieved that at least that part wasn’t a fib.

  The way they had smiled despite their devastation, embracing her so tightly she thought they might never let go, had thoroughly convinced Gretchen that telling them the baby was Sam’s was hardly a terrible lie, not when it made their suffering less difficult to bear. If she had to do it again, she knew that she would.

  “Matilda, where’d you go?” she called out, having lost sight of the cat, her boots crunching over ground that grew increasingly pebbled. She recalled the ping of hail hitting the house, but she didn’t spy frozen balls of ice when she glanced down at the trampled path ahead. What felt like rocks beneath her feet weren’t nettles either. Instead, the earth was riddled with walnuts, many still in their green husks, blending in against tall spring grass.

  Lord Almighty. Gretchen’s eyes went wide as she scanned the floor of the grove. There were hundreds of walnuts carpeting the soil, perhaps thousands.

  But how on earth could that be?

  The hair rose on her arms, and her heartbeat ramped up to an unnatural speed.

  Where had they come from? Not from the barren trees. Besides, it wasn’t even the proper season. She found herself looking up, wondering if they had rained down from the sky. Was it some kind of sign?

  Gretchen tipped back her head, watching as steel-gray clouds began to evaporate like mist, leaving the gentlest blue in their wake. Sunlight sluiced through boughs above and caused the rain-damp leaves to glisten. She closed her eyes for a moment as its warmth washed over her face.

  It was almost enough to convince her that the storm had never passed through the farm at all. She could have savored the calm had Matilda not materialized before her, howling like a banshee and circling something crumpled beneath a walnut tree.

  “Mew, mew, mew!”

  “Okay, okay,” Gretchen told the cat, striding toward the mysterious object. Was it sheets blown from a clothesline? Or a scarecrow tossed from a nearby cornfield? Or was it a trick of her eye, like the time she’d glimpsed an injured squirrel on the drive only to rush outside to discover it was merely leaves and shadow?

  “Uhhhh.”

  As she approached, she heard a sound that was neither a bird’s cry nor Matilda’s noisy meows. It was a moan, low and guttural, and she quickly grasped that its source was very human and very real.

  Gretchen ran forward, ducking beneath twisted branches, her mind racing with each fevered step.

  Oh God, oh God, oh God.

  Soon enough, she glimpsed pale flesh, and her heart caught in her throat at the sight of the man lying prostrate upon the ground beneath the boughs of a gnarled walnut, its trunk split at the crotch. His arms spread and legs extended, he was bearded and barefoot, looking for all the world like a modern-day Jesus.

  “Mew, mew!”

  “Hush!” Gretchen brushed Matilda aside and sank onto her knees, daring to touch the weathered face, so drawn it seemed gray. The skin felt clammy but not cold. Soft puffs of air emanated from pale lips. Leaves and twigs tangled his long gray hair and a beard that reached his collarbone. Dirt stained a torn white button-down shirt. Even his jeans had a rip across one thigh, and his feet were exposed as if the twister had shredded both his socks and his shoes. At first, she thought his hands and feet were burned. Had he been struck by lightning?

  “Are you all right?” she asked, crawling around him, noting that his reddened palms and soles were thick with scars, but she spied no blood or protruding bones. “Can you hear me?”

  The worst of his injuries appeared to be an angry-looking bruise centered on his brow. A swollen mix of green and purple, it mimicked the color of the sky before the storm.

  “Are you awake?” Gretchen tried again, kneeling over him. This time, he moaned, head slightly turning. “Do you know how you got here?”

  His eyelids fluttered, opening just wide enough that she could discern his unfocused pupils within irises as silver-gray as an old buffalo nickel.

  “Am I alive?” he murmured, so quietly she barely heard him.

  “Yes,” she said, and a shiver sliced through her as their gazes met, just for an instant. If she hadn’t known better, she could have sworn those eyes were Sam Winston’s. But it couldn’t be him. It wasn’t possible. This stranger looked older than the almost sixty years Sam would have been, and besides, Sam Winston had died long ago. “Who are you?” she asked, a tremble in her voice.

  “Don’t know,” he whispered back an
d winced.

  “It’s okay.” She squeezed his shoulder gently. “Do you think you can get up?”

  “Help me?”

  Gretchen held on to him as best she could, offering support as he slowly staggered to his feet. As lanky as he was, his dead weight felt like a bag of bricks as he leaned hard against her, making their progress from the grove a Herculean effort.

  “Careful,” she told him as his bare feet slipped over the walnuts strewn in their path. It seemed an eternity had passed before they reached the farmhouse, both of them out of breath. “We’re nearly there.”

  Up the back steps they went, Gretchen’s legs wobbling and arms aching. The man swayed unsteadily, seemingly ready to collapse at any minute. She braced herself before releasing him long enough to pull open the screen and kick wide the mudroom door.

  Overhead, the porch light flickered like a firefly, which made no sense at all, considering they had no power.

  The man sucked in a painful breath, and Gretchen shouted into the house: “Bennie! Trudy! Help! Hurry!”

  “What the devil’s going on?” the elder twin asked, grabbing for the door and keeping it open as Gretchen half dragged the man into the house. “Is someone with you?”

  “A man . . . he’s injured,” was all Gretchen could say between huffs and puffs as she urged the stumbling fellow through the kitchen and dining room, into the parlor. Along their path, lamps stuttered and came on again, and Gretchen couldn’t help but wonder if the fierce lightning had left behind some kind of residual charge.

  “Does he need a doctor?” Bennie asked, doing a good job of following in their footsteps. “Though we can’t call out with the phone dead—”

  “And we can’t drive him anywhere either, not with the oak blocking our way out,” Gretchen told her as she struggled beneath the man’s weight, drawing him toward the claw-foot sofa.

  “No doctor,” the man managed to say, shuffling alongside her. “Just need . . . lie down.”