The Truth About Love and Lightning (20 page)

“The soles of his feet look burned, too,” Gretchen cut him off. “I noticed when I found him. It’s like he’s been walking over coals.”

“Or he’s a human lightning rod.” Tilby ran a hand over the shoe-polish black of his hair. “The whole thing’s just plain weird.”

“Have you found a car abandoned anywhere nearby?” she asked, keeping her voice low, concerned that the others might overhear.

“Not yet.”

“Any bulletin about a missing person matching his description?” she asked.

Tilby shook his head, rubbing his big hands on his dark-polyester-clad thighs. “No, ma’am, nothing.”

Gretchen exhaled gratefully and crossed her arms over her chest. “So what do you suggest we do now?”

The sheriff cleared his throat, tugging at his collar, eyes narrowed. “The only way to know for sure if this man is Sam Winston is to get some blood or spit from him and Abby so we can run DNA,” he was saying, but Gretchen didn’t let him finish.

“DNA from Abby?” she breathed, her knees threatening to buckle.

“Without prints to prove identity, it’s the only shot we’ve got, and it’s a surefire one. If the results show he’s Abby’s father, well”—Tilby shrugged his wide shoulders—“we’ll know he’s Sam. Case closed, end of story. Millie’s cousin works at the county lab. I’ll give her a call, see how much they’re backlogged. We should do it soon though, because results can take weeks—”

“No,” Gretchen blurted out, feeling sick to her stomach. She sank into the armchair where she’d dozed off only hours earlier. “No, it’s not possible.”

Tilby’s wide brow creased. “And why’s that?”

Because it won’t match,
she wanted to shout at him.
Because Sam’s not Abby’s father
.

But even as the words formed in her head, she couldn’t say them. She wouldn’t.

After so many years of living a lie, Gretchen had come awfully close to believing it. Lily and Cooper Winston had died knowing in their hearts that Abby was Sam’s child. Even Annika, who lived and breathed the truth, had never questioned it.

“No,” Gretchen said again, this time more quietly. She went to the window, touched her fingers to the glass, remembering the relaxed look she’d seen on Sam’s and Abby’s faces as they’d come back from the grove. The way they seemed to connect. Gretchen was not going to be responsible for snuffing out her daughter’s most heartfelt wish just like that.

“I understand you’re feeling mighty confused by this fellow turning up the way he did,” Tilby started in, “and how much you want to buy into the dream that he’s Sam. But don’t you owe it to Abby to find out if he’s the real deal?”

“Abby’s pregnant, Frank,” Gretchen confided in a rush, brushing at the tears that sprang to her eyes. “She’s only two months along. She could lose the baby if anything rattled her. She’s thirty-nine. This could be her last chance. If we do anything more to add to her stress, she could miscarry,” she added, and her voice shook just to say the word, as it was hardly fiction. “It’s not worth the risk.”

Frank’s bulldog face crumpled. “I’m sorry, Gretch,” he said, sounding truly contrite. “I didn’t know.”

“Well, you do now.”

The sheriff rubbed his jaw. “I guess we’ll have to figure something else out.”

“Yes, something else,” Gretchen said, pressing fingers to temples, feeling like she’d narrowly escaped a storm of another kind entirely.

Seeds

A tree is known by its fruit;

a man by his deeds.

A good deed is never lost;

he who sows courtesy reaps friendship,

and he who plants kindness gathers love.

—ST. BASIL (329–379)

Sixteen

1952–1956

Sam Winston was conceived on the cusp of spring in 1952.

“A miracle,” most called it, considering Sam’s father, Cooper, had a bad bout with the mumps as a child, rough enough that the town doctor swore he’d been left impotent. Since the whole of Walnut Ridge knew everyone else’s business, folks had naturally assumed Coop was out of commission in the baby-making department. So when word got out that Lily Winston had a bun in the oven, not a few neighbors looked upon the mother-to-be with a bit of a jaundiced eye, whispering that she must have let someone other than Coop dip his ladle in her gravy in order to concoct a fertilized egg. After all, Coop was often gone for weeks at a time, driving a long-haul truck. Still, all one had to do was glance at the couple to see their devotion. The way Lily gazed at her husband—and he at her—made every wagging tongue stop cold. The quiet, dark-haired daughter of Hank and Nadya Littlefoot had eyes only for one man. Soon enough, gossip about the pregnancy died down and any errant speculation about the baby’s parentage was considered utter hogwash.

It was an ordinary enough pregnancy at the start, so smooth that Lily would hardly have been cognizant of anything blooming in her belly except for the difficulty in getting her blue jeans to button up. A true farmer’s daughter, she liked working outdoors, quitting only when the sun went down and her muscles ached. She’d spent her girlhood at her father’s knee, learning how to manage things. She took a tight grip on the reins after her dad had passed, barely loosening that hold once she’d married Coop and her new groom became her partner in life and in business.

But when she’d digested the fact that she was with child—and the town’s general practitioner harangued her about her tipped uterus and ordered her to take it easy or risk miscarriage—Lily agreed to cut back on her hours and left the grunt work to Coop and the farmhands. For the first time in her life, she became an observer rather than a participant, watching from the sidelines as the clouds of straw were removed in late spring from where walnut seedlings had been planted, supervising the fertilization of the grove with rich manure instead of getting her own hands dirty, and directing the careful pruning of dead and broken branches instead of climbing ladders to clip them herself.

When the warm months had bled into the fall, she witnessed the harvest from the back porch, knowing she could neither handle the heavy machinery nor pick up the hulled nuts after they’d been shaken to the ground. Cooper had made her promise to forgo lifting anything heavier than laundry to the clothesline and soon enough she would stop doing that as well.

“How’re you holding up?” Coop would ask her now and again, worried she was going stir-crazy.

But Lily always assured him she was fine, no matter how antsy she felt. “It won’t be forever,” she would remind him, because there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do for their child.

Though she had never been cozy with the women of Walnut Ridge, never joining the Ladies’ Civic Improvement League or bonding over Bible study, Lily agreed with their assessment that the baby in her belly was a miracle. She wasn’t religious and didn’t attend the Presbyterian Church on Sundays with Cooper, but she did have a deep faith in the spiritual. Before his death, Hank had taught her to be mindful of the earth and to respect the spirits who looked out for creatures great and small. She wasn’t sure if it was God or Mother Earth who’d given her the gift of this new life inside her; but she did take her role as its guardian very seriously and wasn’t above asking for guidance now and then.

So concerned was she about protecting the child that she quit driving into Walnut Ridge with Coop to see the doctor, afraid of the long, bumpy ride in their truck. She found a midwife named Delia Boggs who made weekly trips out to the farm, and she followed all of Delia’s advice to the letter. She slept as much as she could, napping whenever fatigue struck. Even if Coop complained of falling behind, she didn’t volunteer to muck the stalls or wade in the slop to feed the pigs. She’d been warned to stay away from animal dung and furred and feathered coats that might breed ticks or bugs, so Lily even ceased chores like collecting eggs from the hens or milking Mildred or Mabel, their two dairy cows. And though she still tended her vegetable garden—until the point when she couldn’t bend over—she refused to do any more vigorous work. Her hands, callused from a lifetime of manual labor, began to soften and her blunt nails to grow.

“How does it feel to be a woman of leisure?” Cooper teased one night after dinner when Lily pricked her thumb for the umpteenth time trying to embroider a bib for the baby.

“If this is how gentrified ladies of Walnut Ridge spend their days,” she told her husband, “then I can see why they’re always sipping gin.”

She felt guilty, leaving more for Cooper to do. She rarely saw her husband from dawn until dark, except when he returned to the house to eat, wash up, or rest. But they both realized all would return to normal once the baby was born. Since the child meant everything to them, neither did much complaining.

Fiercely swollen by her seventh month, Lily began to sit often with her feet propped up, sometimes reading novels and other times darning Cooper’s socks. On a particularly gray October morning, she felt an itch to do something she did very rarely: she drew a bubble bath, easing her swollen body beneath water that was warm but not hot. Leaning her head back so her neck rested against the curved lip of the claw-foot tub, she closed her eyes and dozed off for a few minutes, awakening to the pounding of rain against the glass. Beyond the windowpanes, the sky had turned a nasty shade of gray so that it seemed more akin to night than day.

A rumble of thunder shook the house, rattling the floorboards beneath the tub and setting the bathwater to rippling. Before Lily could get herself out, an ear-splitting crack rent the air and a flash lit up the window so brightly it momentarily blinded her. Tucked beneath the eaves as she was, she felt the force as lightning struck the roof, causing the room in the attic to shudder as if the clapboards holding it together might break apart.

Fearful of falling, Lily grabbed the sides of the tub, sliding onto her behind as suds sloshed around her. Lights flickered and then went dark. A startled “oh” escaped her lips as a current rushed through the water, racing over her skin and setting her arms and legs to furiously tingling.

Oh, please
, she prayed as tears filled her eyes and her hands went to her belly,
please, let the baby be unharmed.

She pressed her palms against her rounded flesh, willing the child to kick or somersault, something to confirm he was unaffected. “Are you okay in there?” she said aloud, terrified the surge that had gone through the water and into her body had stopped the tiny heart from beating. How could this have happened when she’d been so cautious? It was as though a force of nature far greater than she was reminding her who was in charge.

Don’t let me lose him,
she continued to beg.
He means everything to me.

Lily found herself holding her breath until—there!—she felt faint movement inside her, a sensation akin to a fish flopping in water. She saw something, too, as she spread her fingers wider across her belly, absorbing each solid motion. Though her eyes were wide open, she watched the flicker of a daydream unfurl within her mind, what her father would surely have called a vision. Smack in the center of a field of tall grass stood an old man with a feather in his braided hair and turquoise beads around his neck. He looked very much as she remembered Hank Littlefoot, and he cradled a cooing baby, raising it up to the heavens. He smiled proudly and said, “Your son has been blessed. Samuel Henry has the gift and, if he honors it, someday he will become a force of nature.”

Lily gasped as the lights came back on and the gray skies swept past, sunshine again filling the window as if the storm had never happened.

Footsteps thundered up the stairs as Cooper appeared, wet from the rain and out of breath, calling out, “You’re not hurt? And the baby?”

“We’re fine,” Lily murmured as he rushed on about the roof being struck and there being a fire, one that had been put out by the sudden downpour almost as fast as it had started.

As she stood there shivering, Cooper reached for a towel, never pausing as he described how the clouds had blown in, turning the air pitch-black and stirring up rain and wind. “The lightning was brighter than the sun, and a bolt shot down on the farmhouse like someone had taken aim at it. Then the storm disappeared into the heavens again, as quick as it came.” He let out a low whistle. “It was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Lily closed her eyes, hugging the towel around her as Coop patted it with his big hands. Her legs trembled, and she could hardly speak for her chattering teeth; but there was something she had to tell him and it wasn’t about the current that had run through her or the baby’s wild kicks.

“I s-saw my f-father,” she stammered, recalling the scene clear as day. “He s-spoke to me.”

Cooper stopped rubbing her arms and looked her in the eye. “You saw Hank Littlefoot? Maybe you fell asleep in the tub and dreamed about him before the storm shook you awake?”

“No, it w-wasn’t a d-dream. I was w-wide awake,” she assured him as water dripped from her long hair onto her breasts. “He was h-holding the baby, and it was a boy,” she explained, the shivering gone as she began to warm up. “He called him Samuel Henry and said he was blessed. So that,” she told her husband, “will be his name.”

Cooper stared at her like she’d gone crazy.

“It’s a sign,” she insisted, not about to ignore it. “We have to listen.”

“All right,” her husband said, tugging the towel close around her and hugging her tightly. “If you believe, that’s good enough for me.”

And Lily did believe, as fiercely as she had ever believed anything in her life.

In the days and weeks following the lightning strike, Lily was afraid that the baby might stop moving, damaged somehow by the incident. But Sam only seemed to get stronger, kicking harder in her belly so that she could see the movements lift and ripple her skin.

“You can’t come out yet, little one,” she would tell him, softly rubbing around her belly button in circles. “You have to stay inside until you’re big enough to face the world.”