The Truth About Love and Lightning (12 page)

A heaviness washed over him, numbing his limbs and his mind, and Hank slid into a sleep so deep that three days slipped past before he awakened.

It was the noise of hammers driving nails that roused his senses, that and the smell of lemon and bleach, causing him to wrinkle his nose before he’d even opened his eyes. The bed springs creaking beneath him, he forced himself upright even though the fog had not completely lifted from his brain.

He ached something fierce, from his fingers to toes, and he realized the cause soon enough. Both his hands and feet were tightly bandaged in white cotton, salve oozing from the edges. Had he been burned?

“Hello?” he called out, his voice a mere croak. He tried again, hoping to be louder, but his dry throat merely turned the word into a whisper. “Hello?”

He momentarily panicked, heart racing; his gaze darted past the iron bed’s foot-rail to the butter-colored walls and the simple oak dresser with the pitcher and basin atop it. Nothing seemed familiar. He had no clue how he’d come to be there or even who he was.

“Can anyone hear me?” he tried again, willing his aching body to move, but it didn’t want to cooperate. Sitting up made him dizzy, and his shoulder throbbed. Grimacing, he turned his head to see a cloth bandage wrapped beneath his armpit and around his shoulder blade. The faintest tinge of pink seeped through the pale cotton. Had he been wounded there, too? “Please, is anyone here?”

It’s okay,
he told himself.
Someone’s clearly taken care of you, dressed your injuries, and put you to bed. Wherever you are, you’re in no danger.

The thought calmed him down, and he eased back against the pillows. A creak at the doorway caught his ear, and he looked up to find a dark-haired woman approaching. She was barefoot and wore a simple cotton shift that did little to disguise the fullness of her belly.

Her face brightened at the sight of him. “Hank!” She said the name joyfully as she hurried over to the bed. “How do you feel? The doctor wasn’t sure you’d pull through. He claimed your heartbeat was barely detectible and your blood pressure was frighteningly low.”

Hank touched the bandage on his shoulder with similarly bandaged hands. “How was I hurt?” he asked.

“You were burned,” she told him frankly, “on your palms and the soles of your feet. You were struck by lightning, we think. The doctor said it will be painful for a while, but your skin will slowly heal.”

“And my back?”

“Oh, yes, that.” The woman’s sweet expression turned stony. “I told him to cut off the mole, the one shaped like a raindrop. It was so swollen and pus filled, and he was afraid it was infected.” Her eyes narrowed. “I wanted it gone so you wouldn’t be tempted to call the rain again.”

“Call the rain?” he repeated, furrowing his brow. “Was I some kind of magician?”

“Yes,” she said, “in a way, you were.” She crossed her arms below the round of her belly, hugging herself tightly. “But I’m sorry, Hank, you’re not anymore.”

“So I am Hank, and I made the rain,” he repeated, wondering why that didn’t strike him any too oddly. It was as though it all made sense.

“You are Hank Littlefoot, and you have a gift like no other. You were out in the walnut grove three nights ago, summoning the lightning,” she told him, cocking her head and watching him. “You don’t remember?”

“It wouldn’t seem like I should forget something like that,” he said and gritted his teeth as he drew his legs over the edge of the bed. “Or that I’d forget a woman like you.” He met her dark eyes. “You’re my wife, I assume?”

“I will be,” she told him, “whenever you get around to finding a justice of the peace willing to do the deed, hopefully before our baby arrives.”

His gaze dropped to her swollen belly. “We’re having a child, then.”

“We are.” She gave him a most tolerant smile. “I am Nadya, and this”—she placed her hands on her abdomen—“is Lily.” Before a second passed, her smile vanished, and she sighed, impatient with him. “Try harder, Hank. You will remember us. You never forget for very long. Once you’re up and about, the past will trickle back. It always has.”

He nodded, wanting to believe her. Gingerly, he tried to move off the bed, but every muscle winced. Even his bones objected, aching at the marrow. Still, he forced his legs to bear his weight, his arms to push as he rose.

When he stood on the soles of his bandaged feet, he bit his tongue to keep from crying out. The pain was greater than he’d realized.

She had mentioned lightning in the grove, suggesting that he had summoned the spirits of nature and begged for aid to coax the walnut trees back to life. Perhaps if he could see, he would remember.

“Will you help me to the window?” he asked, wobbling.

She caught his arm, holding on. “Go slowly,” she advised and held fast to him as he took an unsteady step forward and then another. “I was afraid you might not awaken this time,” she confessed, not letting him go. “You should see yourself. You could be a man of eighty. These ceremonies have aged you terribly.”

He felt like an old man, one with atrophied muscles and brittle bones. He leaned on Nadya more than he would’ve liked, but it was the only way he could keep moving. His brow was slick with sweat, his heart racing, by the time they’d crossed the room. She let go of him to part gingham curtains from the window.

“I can stand,” he assured her, and she nodded, backing off.

Hank leaned forward, catching his reflection in a pane of glass. It took all his might not to stare at the face looking back at him. The weather-beaten features, the white hair falling on either side of gaunt cheeks: all seemed to belong to someone else.

He was so certain he was staring at a man far older than he.

Ignoring the ghost in the glass, he gazed out, squinting past the thick grass and shrubbery. He glimpsed the side of a barn with bright red boards and, sloping away from that, the first few rows of trees.

Rather than seeing what was there, at first, he visualized the walnut grove, full of gnarled branches and skeletal limbs bare of growth, crooked toward the sky. They looked neglected, abandoned.

Dead.

He blinked to clear his eyes and realized that, in reality, the trees appeared anything but dead. “They are green,” he remarked.

“Yes, very green,” Nadya said, and he heard the gladness in her voice. “The morning after the storm, they were covered with buds and, by the next day, they had leaves. You performed a true miracle, Hank. I’m not sure what gods you pleaded with, but they obviously listened.”

His legs began trembling, and a question that seemed important popped into his head. “Are there walnuts?” he asked.

She nodded. “I saw them myself just before you awoke. They’re ripening in their husks but they should be ready for a fall harvest, I’d think. Though what I know about walnut farming could fill a thimble.”

He closed his eyes as a host of emotions and vignettes ran through him: elation at the rain falling down on him; awe at the silver flash of lightning against the black of night; bursts of orange as a tree was set on fire; warmth and affection as he held the hand of the dark-eyed woman who made his heart beat faster. He gasped for air as his forgotten past filled him up in a sudden rush.

I am Hank Littlefoot, grandson of a shaman, maker of rain, and I am right where I belong.

His knees began to tremble, and he bent forward, pressing his brow to the glass. “I remember,” he breathed.

“How much?” Nadya asked.

“Enough to know that I am home.”

He knew, too, that he’d pushed himself as far as he could go. His grandfather had warned him to stop before it was too late. Hank sensed that he’d narrowly escaped. What if he had died out there in the grove? What if he had left the woman he loved to raise their child alone?

“You are right.” He found the strength to turn to her and gazed into her heart-shaped face, seeing tears in her wide-set eyes. “I’m a farmer now, and that’s all I am.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“And just in time, too.” She sighed, fiercely clutching her arms around her belly.

He reached for her, his finger gliding along her cheek, marveling at the smoothness of her olive skin, without a single line. She looked more like his daughter than the mother of his baby. She would live for years and years beyond anything he would see, long enough to witness many walnut harvests. She would watch the farm prosper and their child grow as tall as the corn in the neighboring fields. No matter how weak he felt, Hank was determined to stick around for their first harvest and their child’s birth. Beyond that, he could offer no promises, not to Nadya or himself.

It took another month till Hank recovered some of his strength and most of his memories. He resumed a few daily chores, such as gathering eggs and milking the cow, but he was far slower than he’d been and much less agile.

Hank was thankful that Nadya stayed with him regardless of the fact that she’d fallen in love with a young man who had, in a few years, grown old. It made him all the more devoted.

Before the autumn harvest, they found an open-minded justice of the peace to marry them so none could call their child a bastard. When Lily arrived all doe-eyed and dark-haired like her mother, Hank wept with relief not to find a single birthmark on her body. He felt grateful that his child at least would live a normal life without the burdens he’d carried.

“You are blessed,” he whispered to the tiny infant as he cradled her in his arms. “You’re blessed to be just as you are. Because sometimes even the greatest gift can become a curse if you’re not careful.”

The Ghost

Of all the ghosts, the ghosts of our old loved ones are the worst.

—SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE,
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Ten

April 2010

Gretchen hardly slept a wink that night, too afraid to leave the Man Who Might Be Sam alone on the parlor sofa. She was terrified of losing him quietly in his sleep to some internal injury before he could even wake up and recall his name. If there was just a one in a million shot that this flesh-and-blood ghost was Sam Winston, she would not let him slip through her fingers. She had already lost him once. Twice would be unbearable.

And if he wasn’t Sam, well, Gretchen believed there was still a reason she had found him in the grove. Some higher power had entrusted her with his well-being, and she wasn’t inclined to fail. She considered him another challenge in a string of challenges that had consumed her the past forty years. First, she had raised Abby, giving the child all the affection and attention that Annika had never given her; living every day solely to mother her baby until Abby had grown up, gone to college, and started her own life in Chicago. Her second task had been taking charge of Winston Walnuts once Lily and Cooper had passed, though that had never been much more than a sideline with no actual walnuts to sell. And she’d kept an eye on Bennie and Trudy, as she’d promised her parents she would, although her sisters managed fine on their own. Indeed, they often roped her into their projects, like volunteering at the Walnut Ridge Historical Society, where Gretchen ended up sorting through hundreds upon hundreds of old newspaper articles and photos, while the twins translated captions and stories into Braille for the archives.

Staying busy had kept Gretchen from dwelling on the one thing she didn’t have: namely, a hand to hold. Despite having been courted through the years by several perfectly decent men, she had never found love, not the soul-melding kind she’d felt for Sam—although she’d only realized years after Sam had gone how deeply she’d cared for him. She could still recall with blinding clarity a long-ago spring night in the cab of his pickup when he’d confessed that he loved her, and she’d shut him down with that kiss-of-death line about just being friends. No, it had taken losing Sam to understand that she needed him in the same way that fire needed air.

So was it wrong for her to assume that yesterday’s storm had happened for a reason? Was she crazy to think that this man with Sam’s eyes was meant to be here, if only to give her a chance at forgiveness, or to help her unravel one of her biggest mistakes?
Something
had caused him to appear out of nowhere—
something
had trapped him on the farm without a means of escape—and Gretchen felt compelled to find out what that something was.

Once she made sure that Abby had drunk her warm milk and gone to bed—her daughter so weary that she fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow—and Bennie and Trudy had retired to their rooms as well, Gretchen had donned nightgown and sweater, taking a seat in the chair across from where the man lay. Armed with a pitcher of water and a damp cloth, she mopped his brow whenever he groaned, placed the quilt back over him when he tossed it off. She strained to interpret his delirious mumbles, but she could make out only a word here and there, things that didn’t make sense: mutterings about water and flies and gorillas.

When the heat of his skin finally cooled and his twitching ceased, allowing him to peacefully rest, the barest hint of pale gray had just begun to permeate the darkness. Gretchen dared to close her eyes for but a minute and fell into an exhausted sleep.

When she awoke, the room was filled with light. Disoriented, she rubbed the crust from her eyes and got her bearings, seeking the fireplace across the room and the braided rug upon the floor before turning toward the Victorian sofa to find the injured man watching her with his silver-gray gaze. He sat silently, such intensity in his face, as though he were trying so hard to place her.
Do I know you?
his expression seemed to be asking.
Why am I here? What is this place?

For a long moment, she simply stared back, sensing tiny prickles of awareness beneath her skin, wondering if he felt them too.

He was the one to break the ice. “Did you stay with me all night?”

“I did,” she said, the directness of his gaze unnerving. She cleared her throat, glancing at her rumpled nightgown and tugging it down past her knees. Deliberately, she closed her cardigan and tucked wayward hair behind her ears. “I’m glad you’re awake, Mr.”—she hesitated, floundering—“I wish I knew what to call you.”