Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

What a great city, Mina thought, and for a moment she didn’t want to leave, felt a kind of longing for it already.

I am sitting at my mother’s kitchen table. The night before, when I arrived, my mother told me Michael had never shown up. Why does this not surprise me? We are looking at the little garden behind her building, Seventy-third Street behind us. It is one of those New York mornings, the Times and the coffee and the toasted bagels. My mother is quiet. I feel my life as sordid and almost ridiculous. What have you been up to? she asksme, and I have nothing to say. I am thinking of our family. My father in Ojai, just trying to live down his mistakes. I imagine he is at the Krotona library, or meditating on the sunset, or cooking his food for dinner. It isn’t horrible. He seems not so bad from a distance.

“If Jack were a stranger, and I met him tomorrow, I might think he was kind of a cool guy, leaving his Hollywood life behind. I mean, dropping out so completely and just trying for some ordinary spiritual, whatever, transcendence.”

“Your brother and your father are mysteries to me,” she says.

“Michael, I thought I was coming here to save Michael. To finally make it up to him for making him a walking elegy to all my expectations. “

“I think it was always hard for you to accept him as he was, or as he is, I should say. But it wouldn’t have made any difference. Nothing would have turned out any differently. I tried a million times to help Michael. It doesn’t make any difference.”

“Yeah, that’s what you think.”

“It’s true. Some things are just unfixable, unanswerable.”

“Well, I’m from fucking California and I want a goddamn answer.”

My mother stops sipping her coffee. Then she smiles.

“Right.”

My mother unscrews the top of a jar of jelly. She spreads some on her toast. I really like seeing this, my mother putting jelly on her toast. I feel as though I might cry, I’m just so happy watching her eat toast. I imagine David, waking alone and making his breakfast in our house. Isn’t it funny how the people so familar to you, so close to you can seem impossible to grasp? You have to imagine them as strangers sometimesjust to see them. I wish I could get far away enough from my own life to look at it like a stranger, see my own life from a distance and see it as all right. My mother is chewing and looking at me.

“What are you going to do?” she says. I shrug.

“I think I’m gonna sleep for about three days.”

Mina stopped in Lorene’s kitchen to write David a note. She wanted to say something about how leaving was such a cliché thing, and to apologize for that. But instead she just said she was off with Lorene for a little break. Lorene stood by the door in her amber-tinted sunglasses, cell phone in one hand and car keys in the other.

“Shake a leg, doll.”

“I’m ready,” Mina said, pasting a stamp on the envelope and leaving it in Lorene’s mailbox.

In the ordinary moments of the past, in the uninterpreted, free-floating, sense-organized memories of childhood, she was inclined to look for clues. To rake over the randomness, to evaporate feelings and look for telltale facts. Why? Because she had convinced herself there was a moment in which these things were decided. What they were all too dense to notice. Where things could have been different. Or maybe he was this way all along. Now they know how to interpret him, put his oddness and dysfunction in perspective. The fragility wasalways in him. The family is absolved. OK, but if either scenario is true, how come Mina was just like him through all those years? How come they were so close they didn’t even have to whisper to each other, they just knew? How come one day it was this way with Mina and Michael, and the next day it was not? One day the mirror was there, the next day splintered in a thousand pieces? Because that’s how it seemed to her, that sudden — like a thing shattering. And she couldn’t do anything to change it.

“She’s not here, she left,” Lisa says. Michael is in the doorway of Lorene’s house. Michael nods. He smiles at Lisa for a minute. She has the door open just a crack. He isn’t as shiny as Lisa imagined Lorene’s friends might be. He looks slight and frail.

“Just like that, huh?” Michael says.

“Seemed like she was running away.” Lisa looks at Michael’s face. He smiles at her again, then looks down to where Alex and Alisa peer from behind her legs.

“What a funny thing, uh, uh. .”

“Lisa.”

“Lisa, to run away when you live by yourself.”

“Yeah,” Lisa says.

“Between you and me, Lisa, I think Lorene is, well, she’s a little nuts.” He laughs at this. “I’m Michael,” he says.

She nods. He gets hunched down and holds out his hand to Alisa and Alex. She sees he’s sweating and although he looks kind of shaky and pretty grubby, she starts to think maybe he needs to eat, or rest. That’s the first thing that occurs to her. And before she can think about it too much, Alex pushes in front of her legs.

“Hey, do you wanna come to my birthday party?” he says to Michael. Lisa smiles, and Michael nods seriously.

“Well, when is your birthday?” Michael asks Alex.

“Today, I think, Mom,” Alex says, looking at his mother and nodding.

“About three months from now,” Lisa says. She watches Alex watch Michael, his small body leaning forward, his hands balled into fists of excitement. Of course they want to see other people. Faintly, somewhere behind that, she feels something else. About herself. The only adult she’s spoken to in days is the woman at the supermarket.

“Do you mind if I get a glass of water?” Michael says the words, then Lisa nods. She stands there nodding and there is a pause and then she opens the door. Is it desperation or optimism that makes people take risks, or start to long for things?

“I’ll get the water,” Lisa says. “Have a seat.” Michael sits on the couch. He is sweating and he smiles weakly at her. He holds his head for a second, then looks around Lorene’s living room. Alex and Alisa are standing by the arm of the couch, staring at the man their mother has led into the living room. Lisa looks at them for a moment, then leaves them and goes into the kitchen. She gets the filtered water out of the refrigerator and fills a glass with ice. Ice also made from filtered water. Good, clean, pure water. The ice cracks when she fills the glass, and she decides to get some cookies out and put them on a smallplate. This is something she is really good at, taking care of people, and she likes doing it. She feels most like herself doing it, she is aware of this, also.

Lisa pushes open the kitchen door with her shoulder, balancing the glass of water and the dish of cookies in each hand. Michael leans against the arm of the couch. His eyes are closed and he is breathing heavily. Lisa puts the glass and dish down.

“Hey, what’s wrong with him?”

“He’s sleeping, honey.” Lisa sits on a chair across from the couch.

“Why?”

“He’s tired, I guess. Now be quiet.” Lisa reaches for a cookie, eating slowly as Michael sleeps. His hands have fallen away from his lap. Lisa notices he has many circle scars, maybe burns, on the tender skin on the underside of his upper arm. Over and over.

Lorene walks through New Orleans, she inhales the city. Its strangeness. The oldness and decay relieve her of things. She thinks about finding someone to talk to. Or not. She spends all day in a cafe reading a nineteenth-century novel she found in a secondhand store. How exhausted she feels, how she just wants to sit and do nothing. She watches the slightly worn-out city, the way it encourages her to do nothing, and she thinks she could stay awhile. “I think I’m falling in love,” she says, in a postcard, which she plans to mail to Mina tomorrow. But when she gets up from the table, she leaves the card behind, already tired of the sentiment.