Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“Well,” said Sylvia, shocked, “did you deserve it?”

But Lisa was already hopping away on her smudged espadrilles towards the dessert table.

She came back with a cream puff — cream puffs! worse than tuna salad! — and with Bill Antoni, the superintendent of the building, a retired custodian. He and his wife lived in the basement, next to the all-purpose room and the storage lockers. He was wearing a tank top that said FORD across the chest, the word buckled by the curve of his belly. Even from this distance, the mustache that hid his upper lip looked dirty.

“George Washington here has a question for you!” he said to Sylvia.

“Patrick Henry,” said Lisa.

Sylvia looked at Lisa, as seriously as she could: as much seriousness as Lisa could hope for herself, or for Patrick Henry. “What is it, sweetheart?”

“Can I have a sparkler?”

“Of course.”

“Told ya,” said Bill Antoni. He smiled at Sylvia, with a little wink like an afterthought.

Should she tell him? A mad spanker in the building. Surely he should know, so he could attend to it, the way he attended to the furnace and the landscaping. But she felt the moment she opened her mouth she would unravel, tell him everything, fall into his arms. Bill Antoni’s mustache was nostril-damp in two channels. He was fat, healthy, alive. The sound of a police siren came winding from the distance, and Sylvia wondered whether it had been hailed by Tillman, coming for her.

Bill Antoni handed Lisa the thin wire of the unlit sparkler. “Hold steady. That’s it. Hey, there’s going to be dancing later.”

Lisa stared at the spot where the stick met Bill Antoni’s flame, and said, “I don’t dance,” and Sylvia thought that was the saddest thing she’d ever heard, and besides, Don’t stare at fire .

The sparkler caught. Lisa held on to it with both hands, as though it were a responsibility, not a pleasure. Yes , thought Sylvia: my fault, my fault . She had made Aaron, and Aaron had made Lisa (though Sylvia herself had no sense of being made by her parents, only loved). If Rena had been there with the steno pad, Sylvia would have signed it, like a confession, and demanded, at last, her punishment. Surely her crimes were capital. She wished to burn like the sparkler, beautifully, fatally. They all watched.

When it sputtered out, Bill Antoni said to Lisa, “What do you mean, you don’t dance?”

“I’m more into forensics,” she said.

He scratched his head with the hand that held the lighter. “Like dead people?”

“Speeches. I give speeches. I’m going to give one today. I have it memorized.”

Sylvia thought this would put an end to it. Bill Antoni would make it clear: this is a block party, not a debate meet, you strange, strange child.

“Well, why not?” he said. “Come this way. That all right with you, Grandma?”

I am not your grandma , thought Sylvia, but she nodded. A moment to breathe. A moment to herself. “Right, then,” said Bill Antoni, and he led Lisa away, and Sylvia knew she’d made a mistake. She never wanted a moment alone for the rest of her life.

The last time she’d seen Aaron in person had been at Thanksgiving, in Boston, ice on the ground; on this day he was dying, it was hot; which would she remember?

They should be inside, to answer the phone. They should be out here, in order not to. She pictured the phone ringing and ringing, Rena forced to stand by one of the hospital payphones, thinking of her mother, cursing her, “Mom, come on, answer,” and Sylvia wanted to fold that girl in her arms, too, the one about to lose her brother, my God, there was no loss like that, was there. Sylvia had gone through it herself with her sisters. Aaron’s eyes were violet and his hair was black. Had been black before it turned silver. That was why she should be with him now, to see the actual person she was losing, though of course she was losing every version of him: the daredevil baby, the thoughtful ten-year-old, the know-it-all teenager.

There was nothing she could do. She was not in Boston. She could only take care of the girl in Des Moines. As long as they were out here, among the slaws and the Jell-O and the burnt hot dogs, the beguiling array of potato chips, the flags attached to tricycles, made into bunting. Out here Lisa was not fatherless and Sylvia was not sonless. Aaronless. They hadn’t yet sustained that particular damage. Damage: a Rena word, as though any of us made it through life in mint condition. But surely some things were worse than others. As long as Lisa didn’t know, she was still perfect. Flawless.

Where was she?

There. In fact, someone had put up a little stage, and Lisa was on it. That haircut Sal had given her was terrible, long in back, layers in the front where the gum had been. The talc at her temples was runneled with sweat. She seemed to have dropped a pickled beet down the ruffles of her patriot’s shirt. Her eyes were closed.

She was delivering the speech.

A small crowd was listening. A few grandmothers, some of the littler kids. Bill Antoni. An approving man in his thirties who looked like a teacher. It was so hot you could hear the mayonnaise go bad, but there was Lisa, gesturing, serious, saying, “They tell us, sir, that we are weak.” July 4, 1976, 43rd Street, Des Moines, Iowa: this girl could start a revolution. Not with her good looks — though look at her, the beauty! — nor with her smarts, but because she is loved, she is loved, she is — Sylvia regarded Lisa’s audience and tried to put this thought in their heads.

Because wasn’t that easier? To change a dozen strangers than a single beloved? Look at this wonderful girl. Yes, thought Sylvia, she’d take the blame but she also demanded some credit.

A teenage boy glanced up, saw Lisa, and snorted.

“But as for me,” she said, she was pounding her fist in her hand, she believed every word, “give me liberty, or give me death!”

— it was never that easy though, was it, to demand a choice. Ask and ask. You might want both. You might get neither.

Once upon a time a woman disappeared from a dead-end street. Her name was Karen Blackbird. She was a skinny, cheerful, nervous woman with muddy circles under her eyes and kinky, badly kept light-brown hair. She was five-foot-one or five-two or five-three. She had a tattoo shaped like a cherub that only a few people knew about, and a bit of pencil point in the palm of her right hand that she’d got as a kid tripping up a flight of stairs. She liked to show it to the children at the school where she worked as a lunch lady. “I could have got lead poisoning,” she said, fingers spread to flatten out her hand. “No, you couldn’t’ve,” the sixth-graders said, and some of the smarter fifth-graders, “pencils aren’t really made of lead, they’re made of graphite.” Still, they liked to look at the X-ray gray speck that broke her life line in half. The children knew nothing about palmistry, little about life, less about love, but they believed in life lines and love lines the way they believed in mercury thermometers: they meant something but probably you needed a grown-up to read them. “It means I’ll write my own fate,” Karen Blackbird would have said, if asked. The children, including her own son, didn’t care that Karen Blackbird was forty-two: all of adulthood seemed one undifferentiated stretch of time. But the ages of objects excited them. When Karen Blackbird disappeared, the graphite in her palm was thirty-three years old.

In this case and no other, Once upon a time means Late summer, 1982 .

Before her disappearance, Karen Blackbird lived in a ramshackle Victorian with her elderly father and teenage son. The son was seventeen but small: five-foot tall and eighty pounds. He hired himself out to rake leaves and shovel snow, he delivered the weekly Graphic —all the usual local-boy jobs. With his dark hair and his newsprint eyes, he looked like an enterprising orphan, though he dressed like a hippie, in jeans faded to gray and ragged slogan T-shirts. The grandfather didn’t approve of how his daughter was raising his grandson. He believed childhood was the furnace in which men were forged: it couldn’t be lukewarm. The grandfather had a head shaped like a bellows, wide at the temples, ears attached at slants, face narrowing down to a mean, disappointed, huffing mouth.