The Truth About Love and Lightning (2 page)

“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.

Two

“It’s not possible. It can’t be.”

Despite what appeared to be the cold, hard facts, Abigail Brink simply refused to believe that she was pregnant.

Even the queasiness that gripped her sporadically from dawn to dusk, the bloated belly, the pressing need to frequently relieve herself, and the two missed periods weren’t enough to completely convince her. These were all things caused by stress and she certainly had that in spades. The small art gallery in Chicago’s Lincoln Park where she’d directed sales for the past eight years had been gradually cutting back on staff and was forever on the precipice of closing, thanks to newly budget-conscious customers and shrinking commissions. She couldn’t afford to lose her job, not when she would have to pay the rent solo since Nate had moved out.

Abby felt quite a lot like a walking cliché: on the brink of forty, careening toward a midlife crisis, and barely holding it together. So she couldn’t be pregnant, not now of all times. Having a baby didn’t fit into her plans, and it made no sense besides.

“It just can’t be,” she kept telling herself, because she’d heard statistics on women her age conceiving naturally and the numbers bordered on anemic. Still, somewhere in the back of her head there was a tiny seed of hope it might be true.

To stop herself from second-guessing, she went by the drugstore on her way home from work, buying a new toothbrush, a bar of soap, and a box of First Response. Not even bothering to take off her coat, she’d shut herself into the bathroom and locked the door, despite being the only one there. Since their argument weeks before, Nate had moved across town and was camping out on the couch of his brother, Myron.

Gulping down water in between, she somehow managed to pee on all three plastic sticks within an hour, and she stared at each for a full ten minutes until every blank oval had sported twin pink lines.

Pregnant. Pregnant. Pregnant.

Though the package insert illustrated that she was clearly knocked up, a tiny warning indicated that women aged forty and up might show false positives because of something called “pituitary hCG.” Abby had months to go before she gave up thirty-nine for good, but it was enough to fan the seeds of doubt.

She showed up bright and early at her doctor’s office the following morning, waiting to have blood drawn, all the while trying to convince herself that she had something else, like mono, Epstein-Barr, or anemia. Surely those things could throw over-the-counter pregnancy results off-kilter, and any one of those diagnoses made more sense, considering how she’d been regularly missing meals and rest.

And still, she couldn’t concentrate on work or sleep that night, pondering what the blood tests would reveal. She stayed awake, gazing at the ceiling, wondering how this could be happening to her at such an inopportune time.

When Dr. Epps had phoned the next afternoon with her lab results, Abby couldn’t help asking, “What’s the verdict?” all the while gnawing on a coarse bit of skin near her thumbnail. “Please tell me all I need are iron pills or a vacation.”

“Well, I’d hardly advise any patient against a vacation, but that won’t change the facts. Everything’s perfectly normal, but”—there, Dr. Epps had hesitated.

“But what?” Abby had asked, biting the inside of her cheek and tasting blood.

“Congratulations, Abigail. You’re absolutely, one hundred percent pregnant.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure as shootin’,” the doctor had chirped. “We should set up an ultrasound so we can figure out better how far along you are, although your hormone level’s consistent with seven or eight weeks. We also need to get you on prenatal vitamins. Should I turn you over to Nancy to make the appointment?”

“Um, no, not just yet,” Abby had mumbled. “I’ll have to call back, okay?”

At which point she’d dropped the phone to the floor and stood with her mouth open, eyes wide, and knees wobbling, certain she was having an anxiety attack. When she’d recovered enough to cross the kitchen, she’d grabbed the calendar from the refrigerator door, counting backward, trying to figure things out.

Had she and Nathan even had sex those two months past? They’d been growing increasingly distant since New Year’s, and it was both their faults. Though, really, all it took was once, right? One night without a condom when a single sperm got lucky enough to do the deed. If only they hadn’t argued, she thought; if only they hadn’t been living such separate lives. How Abby wished things were different, how desperately she wanted to call Nate straightaway and say, “Babe! You’re not going to believe this!” But she couldn’t.

She had to quit staring at the calendar when her eyes began to blur. She was too tired to pinpoint dates, exhausted by long days at the gallery and late evenings squirreled away in the spare bedroom with her easel and paints, deliberately avoiding the things that were missing from their relationship. And if she’d been hiding out, Nate had been no better, burying himself in his laptop, endlessly working on new apps and often disappearing at odd hours for meetings at coffeehouses, clearly more committed to his goals than to Abby.

Her last attempt to put them on the right path had failed miserably. “We need to do something about our situation.” She had confronted him two weeks before, after gathering up the courage to instigate the kind of conversation she knew Nate dreaded most. “We can’t go on this way. It’s not healthy.”

“If it ain’t broke,” he had countered. And though he’d grinned a nervous grin, Abby had read the panic in his eyes.

Any stabs at discussing their living arrangements always made Nathan so jumpy. She could mention something as simple as needing new silverware, and he took it as a prelude to a lengthy discourse on the
M
word. Maybe it was her small-town roots or being raised without her father, but Abby had a traditional streak that went beyond the need to share a bed and an apartment. She’d always assumed that living together would eventually lead to marriage, but as she found herself wanting to nest more and more, she’d sadly realized that Nate wasn’t quite so willing and able.

“I feel like I’m floundering,” she’d told him, and not for the first time. “Don’t you want to move forward instead of running in place?” she couldn’t help asking him. “Don’t you want to make this permanent before it’s too late?”

“When is it too late? There’s nothing wrong with taking the proper time to figure things out,” he had replied, as if reminding her that six years together didn’t ensure that they were meant to be. “My parents were married twenty years before they divorced,” he’d added, his routine argument in such a case. “There are never guarantees that how you’re feeling today will be precisely what you’re feeling tomorrow.”

Okay, sure, Abby understood that his folks’ splitting up had traumatized him, but she’d never known how much until she’d experienced his resistance to lifelong commitment. Unless it was just a convenient excuse for him. Either way, his argument was getting old, as was she. If you truly loved someone, she believed, being with them forever should feel right, destined even.

“There aren’t guarantees for anything,” she’d remarked, another tidbit she’d thrown at him over and over. “My mom didn’t even have a chance to marry my dad before he went overseas, and I know she always regretted not asking him to stay.”

Gretchen Brink had never married, had never even been in love with anyone else but Sam Winston, so far as Abby was aware. Not that her mother had said as much outright, but it was clear in the way she behaved, in her tone of voice and the softening of her eyes whenever she mentioned Sam’s name. Abby didn’t want to end up like that, alone and always wondering what could have been. She and Nate had to seize the day. No one could see into the future. They could both live another fifty years or fall off the El platform onto the tracks and get run over tomorrow.