Be Ready for the Lightning, page 23
“I’m not even a little bit brave. The only brave thing I’ve done in my whole life was on that bus, and I don’t even know why I did it.”
“You should have been his sister,” said Sunny. “Or Annie. Watching those tapes of you guys as kids, up here. You know, I thought you’d be more angry. More upset. About Peter. That I killed him. And what I did, that I said those things to him, told him to—that I talked to him back then. I thought you’d be furious. I thought maybe you’d be mad enough to kill me.”
I licked my bitten lips and said, “Peter said something to me. But I think it was for you.”
Sunny shook her head, a spastic little movement.
“He said, ‘You came.’ Right near—right when he decided to get off the bus with me. When he stopped.”
Something like fury crossed Sunny’s face. Then she said, “Thanks. Really. Thanks.” She took a hand off the gun and reached into her back pocket. “Here,” she said. “Take it. Don’t read it until after I’m gone,” and I accepted the folded envelope and said, “Where are you going?” as Sunny hefted the rifle.
Seeing the barrel move, I squatted down, hands over my head, like in some bygone nuclear drill, as if that could somehow protect me. When nothing happened, I stood up slowly, un-shot, un-hurt, trying to process the situation. I saw Sunny had pressed the end of the barrel against the taut underside of her chin.
“Don’t—” I shouted, just as Ted’s and Conrad’s voices merged with mine.
“Sunny? Veda? Are you guys over here?”
And they appeared, crashing through the trees. Sunny was trying awkwardly to get her hands into position, but the rifle was too long, really, for what she was trying to do. Conrad shouted, “No” and ran over to her, grabbing it, but Sunny held on.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said. “Give it to me.”
And finally she let go.
We had to walk back together after that, and Al and Annie and Marie, clustered outside the cabin under the overhang, saw us approach, Conrad with the rifle in one hand.
Annie said, “What—?” but then stopped, as Conrad turned, gently moving her behind him with his free hand.
He looked at Ted. “Take her and go home,” he said.
Ted and Sunny were standing close together but not touching. He looked at her with his mouth hanging open. Turning back to Conrad, he said, “The wedding.”
“It’s fine.”
The two of them went wordlessly inside and emerged a few minutes later with lumpily packed bags, Ted hefting his guitar in one hand.
“I’m sorry,” said Sunny. “For screwing this up, your wedding and everything.”
“You didn’t screw anything up,” said Conrad. “You just need to go. Get some help.”
My body was buzzing, tense, like my teeth were tuning forks, vibrating.
Sunny looked at me. “Veda, I’m sorry.”
I shook my head but didn’t say anything.
“Well,” said Ted. “I guess we’ll head out.”
As Sunny passed me, she stopped. In a low voice, she said, “I meant it. Please don’t read that letter until I’m gone.”
“I won’t. I promise.” I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble keeping the promise—I had never been less curious about anything in my life. I would have thrown it into the ocean, if I wasn’t sure it would just float back to me, returning like some drowned bride.
—
We all filed into the cabin and stood, stunned and silent, until finally Conrad locked the rifle in the cabinet and pocketed the key.
“What the fuck happened?” said Annie.
“I’m really not clear on that either,” said Al. He looked ashen.
“I’ll explain later,” said Conrad.
Annie opened her mouth to speak and then closed it. Instead she turned and put her arms around him, and he pulled her close.
Finally Marie suggested we eat our cold dinner.
At the table, Annie looked out the window and said, “It looks like it’ll rain for awhile. Everything will be soaked for tomorrow.”
Conrad wrapped an arm around her, and she began to cry, quietly, into his shoulder.
“Sorry, you guys,” she said, between long, shaky breaths. “It’s the hormones.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
The morning of the wedding dawned cold and grey, with rain coming down the windows in wavy sheets. If Conrad was upset that his best friend wasn’t going to be there for his wedding, he didn’t say anything about it. No one said anything, even our parents when they arrived early in the morning, as if Sunny and Ted had never been there, as if I had imagined the whole thing.
We waited until afternoon, turning the radio on and off for weather reports, as if the press of a button could change the news. In the end, Annie married Conrad in the cottage, with everyone crushed together on the old couches and the thunder causing Al to have to repeat himself from time to time. The humidity of the storm had everyone wilted and damp.
But when Al pronounced them husband and wife, Conrad reached out and stroked Annie’s face before kissing her. She closed her eyes, and they stood there like that for a moment, as if they were alone. A flash of sheet lightning lit them up. Marie, sitting beside me, took my hand, the same one that Sunny had held the night before. Then Conrad kissed Annie, and we all erupted in applause, small group that we were, and stood to hug them, everyone laying hands on Annie’s belly, the mothers crying, Al slapping Conrad on the back, like he was trying to put out a fire.
I looked across at Annie and was struck by the memory of her at fourteen, dancing on the beach by the fire. She looked different, and she looked so much the same. As if she could feel me looking, she turned away from her mother, who’d been hugging her, and caught my eye. She raised the champagne flute of apple juice someone had handed her and nodded.
—
The next morning, we all made a big breakfast together, the cabin permeated with the smells of years gone by—the outside scent of wet rock and dirt, the bacon and burnt toast, the slight undercurrent of piss from not flushing after peeing to save the septic tank, the smell of smoke and cut wood after last night’s damp, determined bonfire.
As I was clearing up the breakfast dishes, my father said hesitantly, “Would it bother you if we went shooting?”
At first I didn’t understand and thought maybe he felt bad for never inviting me along. But then I realized why he was worried, why he thought the sound of gunfire might bother me. The first thing people would think about me, for the rest of my life.
“No. It’s fine. It’s not like that. But thanks for asking.”
He nodded and patted my arm. He went to unlock the gun cabinet, and Conrad, coming out of his bedroom, started forward. “I’ve got the key.”
Abandoning the dishes in the sink, I went outside and stood facing away from the cabin. Conrad came out and took his place beside me.
“You’re going shooting, eh? With Dad?” I said.
Conrad turned toward the sun, squinted. “Guess so.” In the bright sunlight, he looked younger, not older. He could almost be the same boy who threw rocks into the water with Al fifteen years ago. Time folding over on itself.
“I have a theory,” he said, and I interrupted.
“No more theories, Connie.”
He grinned. “This is a good one. You’ll want to hear this.”
“What was prison like?”
His smile faltered. “I never went to prison. That’s two years. At least two years. It’s just jail, technically, less than that.”
“Oh, well then,” I said. “Okay. What’s your theory?”
“Okay. I’ve got this theory that everybody secretly thinks there are four things they do really well. Everyone thinks they’re a good dancer, that they’re funny, that they’re good in bed, and that they could write a book or a movie.”
“I don’t think everyone thinks all that.”
“I think they do. Deep down, deep deep down. No one really thinks to themselves, ‘Oh, I’m kind of shitty in bed, or my sense of humour sort of sucks, or I don’t have a story to tell, or—what’s the other one?—Oh, I’m a bad dancer. When their favourite song is on? Everyone thinks they’re kind of sexy, kind of cool, when they dance.’ ”
“Do you think all those things?”
“I think we’ve established that I am not a suitable test for anything to do with normal people. I’m talking the man on the street here.”
“Well, it’s not your worst theory.”
“It’s one of my best. I swear it holds true ninety-five percent of the time. I’ve pretty much figured out the human race.”
“Lucky you.”
My dad came out with the rifles and handed one, the maybe-walnut one that Sunny had taken, to Conrad.
“Ready to go?” he said. Then he reached out and patted me clumsily on the arm again. “We’ll just be on the beach,” he said. “We’ll just be right here.”
I smiled at him and went inside to finish the dishes, and then I got my purse. I took Sunny’s letter out and walked toward the woods, into the Crown land. It was grey but bright, a relief to get into the trees and not have to squint. I stopped and leaned against a tree, not one of the shot-up ones, not as far as Sunny had gone when she’d taken the rifle. I took out the envelope, which was looking a little dog-eared, as if Sunny had stored it away and taken it out, over and over. I wanted to decide what I thought before I opened it. But I couldn’t. Every question led to more questions, like I was cutting off the Hydra’s heads.
In the distance, I could hear my father and Conrad start firing on the beach. The shots were far apart. They were safe, careful shooters. My dad had on dark glasses, I knew, and Conrad had put on proper earmuffs.
I snaked one finger under the envelope flap and pulled back a little, like I was trying to open it without leaving evidence.
And suddenly I didn’t want to be alone when I read whatever was inside. I came out of the trees and went into the cabin, where I got a bottle of the artisanal lavender soda my mother had brought. I smiled at her; she was reading on the couch, while Annie, Marie and Al played a complicated-looking board game I hadn’t seen before at the dining table. I opened the bottle and took a sip; it tasted like kissing a clean, rich woman. I went outside and came up quietly behind my dad and Conrad, watching them, sipping the perfumy soda.
They had lined up empty beer cans on a fairly straight, thick branch of one of the scraggly trees near the shore. The red cans were jaunty against the black bark.
I knew that I ought to announce myself from well back—in fact, before I could even see them, to avoid startling them. Even being in sight without saying anything was terrible gun etiquette and went against everything our father had ever taught us. Even though I’d never been shooting, he’d lectured us both on how to behave around guns, how they weren’t toys, how we couldn’t run up to him when he was shooting or even holding one, how we couldn’t go zipping through the woods, playing out there, if the guns were so much as out of their locked case.
But I didn’t say anything. I wanted to be near them while I read, to be near Conrad. I crept forward, until I could have tossed a pebble and hit either one from behind. The guns were loud. Dad was the better shot, though Conrad was decent.
I ripped open the envelope and took out the paper inside. It wasn’t handwritten, like I’d been expecting. It wasn’t even from Sunny.
There was a logo on top of the paper, from a law firm I’d never heard of, a New York address.
My eyes bounced around from one sentence to another.
Power of Attorney for personal care of Peter Egon Juric
Ongoing medical decisions
Transfer of medical proxy
At your earliest convenience
Client requests no further contact following
She hadn’t followed me to haunt me. She’d come to give me Peter.
As I read, a numbness spread through me, and the soda bottle slipped from my fingers. It hit a rock and shattered, and my father wheeled around at the sound, rifle in his hands. His spongy orange earplugs hung over his chest on a yellow cord. He never liked wearing them, even though I complained that a single shot could damage his hearing without them.
The shot rang out, loud. The sound had a different quality than that of the shots on the bus, not only because the calibre was different, but because there was so little around to reflect the sound, a few spongy trees, and otherwise, open, empty air.
I hadn’t seen the expression on my father’s face in twenty years; it was the same way he’d looked as he’d hurtled down Arbutus Street toward a crumpled young Conrad. His hands opened, and he dropped his rifle.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, which I had never heard him say, not even the time he’d burned his hand on the fireworks. He was coming toward me, yelling. “Veda, what are you doing there? Why didn’t you say anything?”
Behind him, Conrad stood looking at me, his own gun pointed toward the sky, his heart glowing like an ember in his chest.
Blood felt like hot water running down my chest, dripping on the ground. Not onto my shoes, that was another time; my mind couldn’t make the connection, but there was a pair of shoes with a little drop of blood on the toe, somewhere, somewhere.
But no, there was nothing. I was fine, and Conrad and my father were coming over to me, and my father was shouting at me, mad in the way that only the parent of someone who has done something dangerous can be.
“Don’t you know you could have been shot?” His eyebrows were scrunched down so hard, I could barely see his pale eyes below them. I thought his eyes were getting paler as he got older, like they were being washed out.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
Conrad stepped closer then, into my father’s line of vision, and my father flinched, as if he had forgotten Conrad was there. He looked at us both and sagged slightly.
“I’m sorry, dear,” he said. “I—I forgot.”
“I think it’s probably time to go home,” said Conrad.
And we headed into the cottage together.
—
Annie and Conrad spent their first day as a married couple driving Al, Marie and me (crushed into the third seat belt) home in Conrad’s car. Our parents were all on the road before we left—my father had been keen to leave after the rifle incident. I couldn’t help but think he wanted to get away from me.
The day went on to be mercilessly beautiful, clear and bright, causing Annie to bitch non-stop on the ride home about the wedding being rained out.
Still she got out and hugged me, when they dropped me off at my parents’, and when she smiled, it was radiant.
“Did my brother get you extra-pregnant last night? You’re really glowing.”
“Gross. And thanks.”
Al and Marie got out too. They invited me to go with them to Granville Island to take a water taxi tour, but I lied and said I was tired. Or maybe I was tired. Hitching my bag up on my shoulder, I walked into my parents’ house.
Inside it was quiet. I went into the kitchen and started to make a cup of tea. And then, like a timer had hit zero, I sank to the floor.
Peter’s warm hand, the white half-moons at the base of his fingernails. The weight of it. I would get to feel it again. It was relief that bowed me down, not grief.
There was a soft padding, and then my mother was there in the kitchen.
“Will you let me help?” she said, and the uncertainty was unbearable. Her knowledge that I might say no. That I might say, Oh, now you want to help.
I got up onto my hands and knees, and my mother came and helped me stand. I sat down at the table, while she finished making the tea and put a plastic cup of yogourt and some apple slices on a plate, and I ate, even though I’d eaten already on the ferry with the others.
“I don’t know what to say. I never do. I love you. I can’t imagine what it was like.”
“Thanks for telling me about Annie and Connie. I never thanked you.”
“I thought you would want to know. They didn’t know how to tell you. They were worried you would hate them, even though I told them that was silly. But if that was the worry. If you’re going to hate someone, I thought. Well, anyway. He’s your brother, and I thought you should know.”
“I don’t hate you, Mom. I could never hate you—that’s crazy.”
But it was true, of course, that I’d turned away from them. Turned away. The words my dad used for the Church. I turned away from the Church, after I left Cork, I remembered him saying once. The glowing heart matches, the Catholic matches, which he picked up every time he built a fire for us.
I’d wanted them to solve Conrad, fix him. The fact that I couldn’t do it myself only made me madder that they didn’t know how either. How could they not have known? They were adults, they knew everything.
The turning away was also a turning to, though. A turning to Conrad. I could have stood beside my parents, looking at him, lamenting him. Instead I’d stood beside him. It wasn’t a choice, or not one I remembered making. He was my brother.
But maybe my parents had been as clueless as I was. They must have longed sometimes for easier children, for happy family dinners, for me to bring home a nice boy and get married, for Conrad to get a normal job, to show up for a cup of tea after work in a suit, to hold that cup in hands that weren’t battered and scarred. How the desire would have sickened them, to want different children, the wanting like a tiny jet black kernel lodged in their lungs, like a bullet that can’t be cut out. All their windswept, khaki-short-ed cruising, their cheerful gardening, their home improvements, all the bright lacquer over top of that disappointment. And I was sorry for them, finally.
“Did you ever wonder why he is the way he is?” I said.
She didn’t pretend not to know what I was talking about.
“Of course,” she said. She sounded almost insulted. “All the time. Sometimes I wonder if the concussions had something to do with it.”
“I don’t know. Can that happen?”
“I’ve done some reading.”
Could it be that simple—some essential wiring short-circuited, some tender bit of brain crushed? Or was there something else I’d forgotten, something among the many things, one magic key to unlock everything? I was the younger one; maybe there was something I didn’t remember or that I’d been too dumb to notice. Maybe something that had been small to me, unnoticed by my parents, had been large to Conrad. Or would Conrad have been himself in any family, in any place. Was he born with a set number of punches that had to be thrown?
