The Truth About Love and Lightning Page 4

  “Okay,” Gretchen agreed, knowing that unless she walked the five miles into town for help, they were pretty well stuck out on the farm anyway. “Here you go,” she said and, as gently as possible, let him down on the couch.

  He crumpled like a rag doll upon the worn linen cushions, and she gently lifted his legs and settled a pillow beneath his head. She rested her palm against his grizzled cheek as his head fell slack, his eyes closed.

  “Sir, are you still with us?” she asked. “Can you speak?”

  He didn’t answer. Didn’t even moan. He’d slipped hard and fast into unconsciousness.

  “What’s going on? Who’s with you, Gretch?” Trudy wondered aloud, coming up behind her sisters.

  “She found a man,” Bennie said.

  “Out on the farm?”

  “In the walnut grove,” Gretchen told them both, watching the slight rise and fall of his chest. “He was lucid and he’s breathing, just banged up a bit.”

  “What if he’s got internal injuries?” Trudy wrung her hands. “We could be doing him more harm than good by keeping him here.”

  “But we have no choice,” Gretchen insisted and took a deep breath. What did they expect her to do, perform surgery with a steak knife and suture with knitting needles? They had little more in the house than a basic first aid kit. “Look,” she said and rose from her crouch, facing her sisters, “I won’t let him out of my sight tonight, okay? And when the phone’s back on, we can call for the doctor. We can’t haul him anywhere until the tree’s been cleared. So we’ve got no choice but to stay put. We’ll have to do the best we can and hope that it’s enough.”

  Trudy nodded. “You’re right, of course, Gretch. I didn’t think.”

  “Well, at least the power’s back on.” Bennie squinted milky eyes, looking around them. “It’s brighter than it was before. Did they fix the line already?”

  The lights were indeed on, but Gretchen had no explanation for it. The house had been dim before she’d brought the man inside. “I can’t honestly say that anything’s fixed.”

  Trudy touched her twin’s arm. “How can you worry about the lights when there’s a mystery right in our midst? Don’t you wonder who he is and where he came from?”

  Bennie nodded, tilting her wide face toward Gretchen. “Indeed, I do. Where did you say you found him?”

  Gretchen wiped grubby hands on her jeans, ignoring how her fingers trembled. “He was lying in the walnut grove looking as though the tornado had flattened him,” she explained, having no earthly explanation for how he’d gotten there. “Matilda led me to him. She threw quite a fit until I followed her. He was at the end of a path of trampled grass and walnuts.”

  “Walnuts?” Trudy repeated. “From our trees?” Her eyebrows knitted together above the wide bridge of her nose, sporting the same puzzled expression as Bennie. “That’s impossible. The grove hasn’t produced in years, not since the day the old pastor told you Sam wasn’t coming home.”

  “I haven’t a clue where they came from,” Gretchen said and held on to the nearest chair as she bent to tug off her muddied boots. “It’s like the sky spit them out instead of hail.”

  “Ah, that’s the second time the heavens have rained walnuts on this farm,” Bennie muttered and reached for Trudy’s hand, giving it a squeeze. “Who did you say this man was again?”

  “I didn’t say, because I don’t know,” Gretchen answered, tucking her boots aside, very glad the twins couldn’t read her face. Because they would have seen quite clearly that she wasn’t telling them the truth, not the whole truth anyway. There was something about the man that seemed far too familiar, beyond the color of his eyes, beyond the strange coincidence of the walnut rain. “I asked who he was but he couldn’t remember. I’m sure it’s because of the bump on his head. Let’s let him sleep, and when he awakens, we can ask him all the questions we want.”

  But her sisters weren’t done giving her the third degree.

  “Is he old or young?” Trudy asked, taking a step closer to the sofa and hovering, as though she could see the stranger lying on the divan.

  “More old than young, but mostly filthy,” Gretchen said, pushing ashy strands of hair from her face.

  “Tall or short?” Bennie asked next.

  Gretchen sighed, impatient to get to the kitchen. “He’s taller than I am.”

  “He smells of loss and deep sorrow,” Trudy declared as she squared her chin. “Like he’s been wandering for years and years.”

  “He smells of something, all right,” Gretchen agreed, though she would describe it more as mud and sweat.

  Gretchen left them for a minute to fetch a clean dish towel, which she dampened with warm water. Then she returned to the parlor, settling on bended knees beside the couch. For an instant, she merely studied the angular shape of the face, the width of his brow, the set of his chin. Even half smothered by hair entangled with dirt and grass—despite the damage inflicted by the years—there was definitely something there, something that reminded her of Sam.

  “Let’s clean you up a bit,” she said quietly and gingerly brushed a matted lock of gray from his brow before she touched the moist cloth to his cheeks. His soot-dark eyelashes twitched, and she wondered if he could feel her presence, even in his unconscious state, wishing she could voice aloud what she couldn’t stop thinking.

  Samuel Winston, is it you beneath the dirt and changes wrought by forty years? Could you have returned after all this time? Did you not really die in Africa? Did it merely scar your hands and feet, weather your skin, and turn you into an old man before your time?

  Yes, it was far-fetched, desperate even. But what if this man truly was Sam? What if he’d been dropped back into her life after all this time—after the big lie she’d told since she’d last seen him? What if he’d come back to the house that was rightfully his, to the farm his parents had left to her and Abby, believing she was Sam’s one true love and Abby his only child?

  What if he woke up, remembered all, and exposed her whopper of a fib?

  Stop it, Gretchen told herself and expelled a held breath. She’d been shaken by the storm, unsettled by the felled oak and inexplicable shower of walnuts. Those were muddling her mind, causing her to leap to an improbable conclusion.

  “The walnuts,” Trudy said, as if sensing the direction Gretchen’s thoughts had taken. “Don’t you figure they must mean something? Didn’t they always say that he could control the sky?”

  “And make the rain,” Bennie chimed in.

  “It has been rather quiet since he left for Africa.”

  “Like the farm has been holding its breath—”

  “Stop it,” Gretchen said aloud, concerned that her sisters had begun to wonder about the very same things that needled her. “Those stories about Sam, they’re just tales that grew taller after he disappeared. Just small-town gossip because Sam’s grandfather was a shaman. Sam Winston was a man like any other man,” she remarked, although that in itself was a lie. Sam had been like no one she’d ever known, a fact she hadn’t truly appreciated until he’d vanished from her life forever.

  “But, Gretchen—”

  “I mean it, Bennie,” she cut off the older twin. “Not another word.”

  Even as she pooh-poohed their suspicions, she felt the strangest pull, a physical tug that wouldn’t let her go. Like a part of her had been awakened from the deepest sleep and now twisted and turned within her breast, pressing at her from the inside out. Regardless of what common sense insisted, a tiny hope grew within her, tingling through her limbs, the nerves catching fire, causing the tiny hairs on her arms to stand on end.

  It was as though she’d seen a ghost, and the sort that was not wispy and translucent, but instead was solid to the touch and smelled like a real man.

  “Was there a car or truck near him?” Bennie asked, clearly unable to resist asking questions altogether. But at least this one was reasonable. “I didn’t hear the crash of metal, but there was so much other noise besides.”


  “I didn’t see a car dumped anywhere,” Gretchen admitted. “He has no shoes and his feet look scarred, but they’re hardly filthy enough to have walked a long ways. Who knows how he got here,” she said and stood between the twins, gazing down at the man.

  “Only one thing makes sense,” Trudy said in her ever-quiet way. “He rode in on the twister.”

  “You know, Trude,” Gretchen whispered, “I do believe that he did.”

  It was as if the sky had opened up and dropped him right into her lap.

  Four

  An entire day slipped by as Abby alternately drew in her sketchbook and stared out the window of the Amtrak train, seeing but barely noticing the passing countryside. Her mind raced faster than the clickety clack of the wheels on the track, leaping ahead, imagining what it would be like months from then when her belly swelled to the size of a watermelon and she gave birth to a squealing infant.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, clutching the sketchbook against her thrumming chest as she envisioned cradling the child in her arms. Would it be a boy or girl? Would it look like her or Nate, or a combination of the two of them?

  She could hardly breathe, wondering suddenly: What if Nate really didn’t come back? Would she be alone through it all? Could she have their baby without him? Was she strong enough for that?

  That she couldn’t answer any of those questions caused her head and heart to ache.

  By the time they pulled into the Washington, Missouri, station, dusk had firmly entrenched itself over the landscape. The sun had vanished below the distant tree line, and deep plums and pinks streaked across the horizon like the blur of watercolors smeared across a sheet of rag paper.

  A kindly older man who’d sat across the aisle from her throughout the trip—who’d given her a pack of peanut butter crackers—picked up her suitcase from the train and plunked it down on the platform. Abby thanked him profusely before she slung her purse across her chest and picked up her bag to haul it around the building.

  The noise of crickets lightly floated on the air, a sound she hadn’t heard in ages. Not that they didn’t have crickets in Chicago; but those crickets played solos. Here, they played symphonies. Once she’d called a cab to fetch her, she sat on her suitcase and listened until the yellow car pulled up. She gave it a wave and stood.

  It was another fifteen miles down the rural route to Walnut Ridge and the Winston farm on its outskirts. As near as she was to home, she still couldn’t reach her mother. Every time she dialed, she got the same rapid busy signal, which had her on the verge of panic. “I can’t seem to get through to my family,” she said aloud, frustrated.

  “Don’t know if you heard, but a storm passed through Walnut Ridge earlier,” the driver told her as they hurried along the one-lane road, although Abby didn’t see any sign that a storm had been anywhere near Washington. As if reading her mind, he went on, “It was very localized, they say. Didn’t get a drop over this way, though we could’ve sorely used the rain.”

  “Sometimes these things are hit or miss.”

  “This one sure was.”

  In the car’s headlamps, the asphalt looked gray and dry, the surface cracked. Even in the quick sweep of light, she could tell the brush on either side was brown with dust.

  The driver was right. The earth needed a good drenching.

  Abby leaned her brow against the glass, tensing more with each passing mile, knowing things were different now and would never be the same.

  Though she’d been home four months ago for the Christmas holiday, she viewed the shadowed landscape with a changed eye. She had grown up in these parts, had a primal affection for the region—for the barns and silos, the clapboard houses and rows of crops seaming the dirt, the vast spaces between a farm and its neighbors—and yet she missed Chicago something fierce.

  She missed Nathan.

  She had left him behind without so much as a word about where she was going or when she’d return. Even if coming home was something she had to do for herself, she knew it wasn’t fair to have done it like this. She was keeping a secret from Nate, and it felt nearly as awful as lying. And Abby hated lies more than anything else.

  “So you haven’t talked to anyone at home?” the driver asked, obviously making small talk, as she’d already told him she couldn’t get through to the farm.

  “No,” she said. “Their phone doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “Weatherman on the radio said there might’ve been a funnel cloud a few miles outside Walnut Ridge proper,” the driver remarked without taking his eyes from the road. “Something popped onto the radar from out of nowhere and disappeared in a matter of minutes.”

  A funnel cloud? Okay, that was more than a spot thunderstorm. Why hadn’t he mentioned it before?

  “Was there damage? Was anyone hurt?” Abby asked and leaned forward, the shoulder belt tugging against her. Instinctively, her arms enfolded her belly as she fretted about her mom and aunts. Without a telephone, they were cut off from the outside world. She knew they didn’t even keep a laptop at the farmhouse, since Gretchen insisted they couldn’t get online even if they tried. “The house must not want it here,” her mom had said, but Abby hadn’t wondered if it was more like Gretchen didn’t want it. It was better that way, according to her mother. I’m not going to live and die by gadgets, Abs. I want to talk to the people I love face-to-face, and I want them to listen.

  And so the computers remained entrenched at the Winston Walnuts storefront in downtown Walnut Ridge. Not that they had any walnuts to sell these days. But they did a decent business in carved bowls, serving pieces, jewelry, and other decorative items made from the wood. In fact, every now and then, Gretchen would ask Abby to consider coming back and building more of a gallery to feature local artists of all stripes, not just those who made pretty things from chunks of wood.

  The idea of returning to her small town hadn’t appealed to Abby with her life and Nate’s in Chicago. So she hadn’t even dwelled on the idea except in passing, not until the past few weeks.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to get a read on things in these rural areas,” the cabbie was saying, interrupting her thoughts. “Especially with power and phone lines knocked out.” His dark eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. “So just ’cause you haven’t heard from your kin doesn’t mean much. I’m sure your family’s fine.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Abby said, settling back against the vinyl seat, hardly reassured. She recalled her mom describing a twister that had hit the farm before she was born, right after her dad had died in Africa. Gretchen had spoken of walnuts falling like hail, lightning setting the sky afire, and winds swirling through the grove of trees until every branch was stripped bare. Whatever damage it caused must have been fierce, as those trees had never produced another crop. And though they’d tried to replant, nothing grew in the soil. It was as though the farm itself had given up the day that Sam Winston was lost to them.

  Abby could only hope that twisters were like lightning and didn’t strike the same place twice. She couldn’t imagine what she’d do if anything happened to her mom or her aunts. Nate might be her one true love, but they were her heart and soul.

  The cab bumped along for another dozen miles as the last vestiges of deep purple were swallowed by navy blue and night swooped in for real. Abby’s stomach tightened the nearer they got to the farm, and she found herself following the crooked line of the railroad tie fence that encompassed the property, biting her lip when she noticed more than a few lengths missing.

  “No wonder you can’t get a call through,” the driver said, ducking his head to gaze up through the windshield.

  Abby had to roll down her window and stick her face out to see what he was looking at. The moonlight blackened the tangle of utility lines dangling from the sky.

  “Wow,” she breathed.

  But that wasn’t what really spooked her.

  As the cab veered off the rural route onto the unpaved drive that led to the farmhouse, Abby spo
tted the broken tree limbs strewn about, like large bones from an enormous skeleton, arms detached, fingers clawing at air.

  “Whoa!” the driver said, hitting the brakes and jerking Abby forward. He switched on the high beams as he stopped, wet gravel popping beneath the tires. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”

  Abby pressed her palms flat against the front seat, holding steady, her heart pounding. “What is it?”

  “I can’t go any farther, miss, I’m sorry.”

  “What? Why?” she said at first, before she unfastened her seat belt and peered through the plastic partition, seeing quickly enough what the problem was. Something gray and enormous lay in their path, blocking the drive.

  Abby’s brain took a second to process what it was, and then she found herself choking up. “The old oak,” she uttered, the words emerging as a sob.

  “That’s some tree,” the driver said. “Must be a good nine foot around.”

  It had towered over the front lawn since Abby could remember, shading the grass, providing a haven for so many birds that whenever she’d stood below it, it had seemed the whole tree was alive with chatter.

  “Guess this is it,” the man said, the interior light switching on as he pushed open the door. “I’ve got bad knees, I’m sad to say. I couldn’t haul your bag all that way for you even if I tried.”

  “It’s okay.”

  He got out and rounded the car, popping the trunk to remove Abby’s suitcase.

  She emerged from the backseat, her legs unsteady from sitting on the train all day, her heart breaking at the sight of the fallen oak. She was too far still to see the house, but she could feel it there, waiting.

  “You want me to stay here? You can call from your cell when you reach the door,” the driver said as he came up behind her and set her suitcase down on its wheels.

  No, I can’t, she wanted to tell him. Her cell wouldn’t work on the farm. It never did.

  Instead, she said simply, “I’m good, thanks.” Then she dug into her purse for the fare plus a tip. Even on the off chance that no one was home, she knew where Gretchen hid the key. “Don’t fret about me. I’m right where I want to be.”