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The day my mother was struck by lightning, I was eight and
half years old. We were all standing, my mother, my
stepfather and I, on a viewing point at the Grand Canyon,
marveling at the three types of weather around us. My
mother, uncannily acute to shifts, warned us that though we
saw a rainbow in the middle, a sunset on the left, and only
a hint of storm clouds rolling in on the right, the storm
would win out. My stepfather, acute to denial, ignored her
worries. But I didn't, and that feeling you get that you
will always be tied to your mother, hit me then, and I was
ready to get in the car and head back to the campsite. Her
concern hit me somewhere primal, and I knew that we both
felt something shifting.
My stepfather won out and we didn't leave. In fact, we
stood looking longer with a crowd of people, pushed up
against the precarious metal railing that separated us from
the danger of the endless canyon below. I stepped away
from my stepfather and my mother and ventured toward the
sunset.
Now this is where my memory gets hazy, and the lightning
comes down and splits the idea of what is possible, what is
not, what is feared and when fear really happens. I heard a
loud cracking sound, one that's force pushed my wiry body
against the railing I assumed would protect me. I felt
that metal railing push into my chest and I held onto it as
I hope to never hold onto anything again.
My stepfather grabbed me from behind by my t-shirt.
I thought of my mother. Like a flash of danger coming from
the heavens that thought froze me, and the next thing I
knew my stepfather pushed me into the safety of the car.
The crowd of people dispersed. Some were running, some were
backing away from the railing; some were crowded around a
spectacle that I had yet to find out about.
My mother found us, and she was right. She opened the front
passenger door of the car and got in. Her hair was standing
up in all directions, a mass of static tangles. The first
thing I did was lean forward and touch it. It sent a spark
through my fingers. Neither of us spoke. We were both in
shock. But I was relieved to see her.
My stepfather had the gall to ask her what happened. He'd
saved himself and me, and left her behind. She told us
that the bolt split into threes. It'd hit her, a man, and
his thirteen-year-old son. That is why they were still
alive, this split. The boy peed his pants and went into
hysterics. She and the man were startled, they'd seen blue
light travel underneath their skin, and they'd been
knocked down on the ground with the boy. My mother stayed
to calm the boy down. She'd told the father to take him to
the hospital, just in case.
"Shouldn't we take you to the hospital?" I asked my mother.
I was guilty for being taken away when she needed me. At that
moment she seemed more like a ghost, with her electric hair and
ashen face.
My stepfather was looking out the front window of the car.
A cloud opened up and it began to pour.
"Let's just go back to camp," my mother said.
"Are you sure?" my stepfather asked her, still not looking
at her, but looking as if he wanted to touch her hair too,
not out of love, but out of curiosity.
"I told you we should have left," she said pointing to the
rain cascading against the glass of the car windows. "I
mean look at this. How the hell are we going to
drive back in this?"
Then my stepfather did something very strange. He did
something that made me feel like all three of us were stuck
on opposite sides of that canyon, something that even to a
forgiving child seemed infinitely wrong and out of place.
He got out of the car and took pictures of the storm.
"Goddamn it," my mother yelled, leaning over to the open
driver side door. She reached over and slammed it shut,
then turned to look back at me, silent and pressed up
against the back of the seat.
"I'm okay," she said. "We'll get back soon."
My mother and I sat silently, looking out the window at my
stepfather taking pictures, getting soaked, rain clouds all
around him. I guess he figured one of us had already been
struck, and that his chances of being hit were now next to
nothing.
He was wrong. Because what I didn't know, though I felt it
then, both nausea and relief in my small kid body, was that
my mother was going to leave him. What I saw was his lack
of concern for her, his appropriation of me as outside of
her, and what I didn't know was that in my mother's steely
calm, in that electricity sprung from a splitting of light,
a plan was already forming in her newly charged cells.
My stepfather did get back in the car. He drove us back to
camp, but before that my mother asked if she could stop and
make a phone call at a gas station. I didn't know it then,
but I know now, she was calling her lover. She was calling
to tell him about her scrape with death. She was preparing
to live.
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