The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone Read Free Book Online Page B

had gone to wherever they go when it gets really dark, Becca and Bo settled beneath an oak, his snout on her thigh. She told him about the note she swiped from her mother’s jewelry box. “It’s not a big deal, except that it says ‘Rowe.’ That’s my dad’s nickname. His mother called him that.” Bo grunted as though he understood.
       T HE S TRAWBERRY N OTE:
    Rowe,
        I’ll be a half hour late.
        Patty
        “It’s nothing really,” she told Bo, “but I wanted to read it. Carrie says that no one should read another person’s private letters, but I wonder if that’s true when the other person is your husband.”
    Understandably, Bo had no comment.
    Becca said, “I have the letter now.”
    The next day, Becca and Grandma Edna heard Mary scream. Becca said, “What was that?” They were in Grandma Edna’s bedroom. The scream came from upstairs. Becca led Edna up the rickety basement steps to the dining room. The heavy red curtains were ripped from their hooks. The room filled with sunlight, making it hard to see.
    Mary looked up at the young Becca and the old Edna. “I think she’s overdosed. Call an ambulance!” Claire sat listless, wrapped in one of the drapes, dust particles rising into the summer light.
    At Farmville General, the hospital people in mint green scrubs mea sured from Aunt Claire’s nose to her ear, from her ear to her breastbone. They marked a tube and guided it through her nostril, farther and farther, and they ordered, “Swallow. Don’t fight this.”
    Aunt Claire gagged and choked. She fought. “Go on and swallow,” they said. They slid a syringe into the end of the tube and plunged something down the line. They said, “You’re doing just fine.” With another syringe, they drew fluid out. There was another syringe and another, and Aunt Claire coughed. She jerked right and left, shaking the gurney and spattering chalky vomit onto a male nurse and the institutional tile. She cried. Then, soon after, she was quiet.
    Becca was there, invisible to the nurses and doctor, her backpressed against the wall, one hand covering her mouth. She wasn’t scared exactly. She was shocked at the physicality, the force it took, to empty someone’s stomach. She felt nauseated, like she might never eat again.
    Grandma Edna and Becca’s mother were in the waiting room, filling out paperwork. They’d misplaced Becca, who was down the corridor in a curtained room, waving to Claire, who’d been wheeled down the hall to some new place with an institutional floor and the smell of disinfectant. There was a man mopping the vomit. There were two nurses dropping tubing and syringes into stainless-steel boxes marked with skulls and crossbones.
    Despite Becca’s wild red hair and Holly Hobbie shirt and matching jeans, no one saw her. She listened as one of the nurses, the skinnier of the two, said, “She’s going to be fine. She’s lucky she has some meat on her bones. Her metabolism saved her life. Not like this case I worked in Arkansas, in this little town, Mont Blanc. You wouldn’t have heard of it. There was this girl, a beanpole, with black hair and doe eyes. She was such a pretty thing. A young girl with so much potential. I still remember her name: Clementine. She shook me up. I wondered if I was in the wrong profession. Anyway, this poor girl was basically homeless, living in this god-awful commune, Drop Out City. Some people never give up trying to die. She was one of them.”
    The nurses spotted Becca. “You’re not supposed to be in here.”
    “I’m lost.”
    “The waiting room’s down there.”
    The other nurse said, “I need a smoke.”
    Becca left to find her mother and grandma, to tell them that Claire would be okay—at least for now. She hoped that Claire wasn’t one of those girls who’d never give up trying to die.
    That night the wind gusted. It rattled the chairs on the side porch and knocked a wind chime to the concrete. The rain camein