A sickness slid through me. I felt it first at the top of my head and then bubbling through the veins of my scalp down through my neck, lungs, and heart, only to settle somewhere in the bowels.
“That’s too bad.”
“We’ve been apart almost since it happened. This was two years ago now. My son’s always been a kind of… I don’t know, a handful, I guess you’d say. He has moments where he can be really sweet, but then he’ll do things—just behavioral problems. We thought he was maturing for a while, and then— You know, I thought he was just being a kid. And then he did something truly…”
It slipped out of my mouth before I could catch it, this bit of the sickness coming up like bile. “What?”
“There was a kid a year younger than him, a sixth-grader, who he picked on. He hurt him pretty bad. After school. So they took my son away.”
Maybe he’d shared this with me so I would tell him something. About my father’s death or his mistress or my mother or siblings or the actor. But it wasn’t a game I wanted to play. Instead I said, “Sometimes I have this… I guess you’d call it a nostalgia. A nostalgia for the worst moments of my life.”
“That sounds terrible,” he whispered.
“No, it’s not. I like remembering them. Because those moments—that’s what’s vivid. Unforgettable.”
He pulled me closer, and I let him. Outside, the thunder shook the whole building, and the lightning spiked again, and this time the entire sky raged with electric-blue fire.
Book III 
WITH SPEED AND VIOLENCE
T
HE
D
ERECHO AND THE
L
IGHT
2030
It was the third such storm of the summer, and the pattern was becoming familiar. The thermometer soared toward triple digits, the sky darkened, the air turned that jaundiced green, and then, as though a vacuum cleaner sucked up the heat, the temperature plummeted. The wind and rain started up, and as Casey Wheeler explained, “Brother, you better be off the road and taking cover, ’cause who goddamn knows what’s coming out the sky.”
The first time you were coming home from work, and it was like a whiteout with rain. A five-minute drive turned into a twenty-minute white-knuckle-grip ordeal. You inched along in the battering-ram wind, tires sluicing through deepening water, until reaching the safety of your driveway. You’ve heard them called derechos, but a “land hurricane” is more apt. And tonight, when you get home to find Toby mashing a fistful of peas into pulp and Raquel anxiously watching the Weather Channel, you know another superstorm is on its way.
“They ain’t even cleaned nothing up from the last one,” Raquel bitches.
After putting Toby down, you climb into bed, exhausted, and drift off for what feels like a blink.
Then you wake to the wind. It’s the sound of driving through a tunnel under a mountain. It surrounds your two-bedroom rental, the one you and Raquel worked so hard for so you could get out of the trailer court. As during the last two storms, you worry if the heap will hold together. The house has no basement, let alone a storm shelter. The rain begins, pummeling the siding. Raquel stirs. You lie in the dark and wait. The storm grows louder.
Finally, light flashes outside and the rattle of distant thunder wakes Toby, whose wails match the intensity of the storm.
“Baby,” says Raquel, as a way of asking you to get him. And that’s fine. You can’t sleep through this shit anyway.
Pulling the howling Toby from his crib, his frightened hands grope for you. As you hoist him into your arms, the power goes out, and he screams louder.
You take him to the living room where the window looks out over the road, train tracks, and a small field. The streetlamp is out, along with electricity for the rest of the block, and you and Toby can only stare into a wall of darkness. Toby hates the thunder, and you can’t really blame him. With each crack, you can hear the plates in the cupboards, the silverware in the drawers, jittering.
Lightning strikes and it blesses the whole neighborhood with a moment of purple daylight. In that instant you catch a glimpse of a figure across the tracks, struggling down the side of the road. You hope the guy is smart enough to get indoors fast. The last two storms, they were talking eighty-, ninety-mile-per-hour winds. When the lightning comes again, he’s gone.
Toby moans at each boom, but he also appears fascinated by the lightning. He sucks on his fingers and watches wide-eyed for each round of illumination. His black hair has turned kinkier, but he has a smattering of your freckles. He reminds you of the picture on your mom’s refrigerator, the one from Soak City Water Park.
“That’s lightning, Toby. See, nothing to be scared of. Just lightning. Just rain.”
But you know this isn’t true because you can feel your blood racing with the fear of the storm. And when a bolt of lightning splits the sky and strikes a tree across the road, Toby screams, and you can’t help but grip him against your chest in a full-body recoil. The tree explodes in sparks and splinters, half of it crashing onto the telephone wires. Your heart is as loud in your ears as the thunder.
You’ve never seen lightning that close before. It was more weapon than weather.
After an hour the storm passes, and Toby drifts off on your shoulder. You put him back in his crib. You think of going to bed, but you’re too awake. Your skin too itchy.
Instead, you get a paper bag from the kitchen. Then you get a can of Raquel’s hairspray. In the bathroom, you sit on the toilet and spray, gathering fumes. You hold it to your face and breathe. You do it again. It’s a cheap high, but it helps. You sit back against the toilet, and in the blackness, you see that blue-purple bolt of lightning shredding that tree over and over.
In the morning, you have a headache from the hairspray. There’s still no electricity, and the heat of the day is already descending. Raquel snaps at you when you open the freezer because the food might spoil. There are only a couple of soggy microwave dinners, though. The window AC units are useless, so Raquel will have to take Toby somewhere with air-conditioning, probably the Walmart with its generators. You’re late for work because there are downed trees everywhere, and only so many road crews to clear them. You think with all these storms, maybe there’s better work doing tree cleanup or repair, but this is your typical dead-end thinking. Ideas you’ll never do anything about. You pass a house where the kids’ trampoline has blown onto the roof and snagged on the chimney. Another house has a tree shot through its upper floor; an upstairs bedroom now exposed. Through downtown, past empty storefronts where the windows have soap cataracts, multiple cars have been crushed by fallen trees. One SUV has been cut nearly in half; the sturdy oak now embedded in its middle seat. You edge past a busted recliner mid-street. There are more stray dogs than ever, nosing through trash.
The Kroger is packed. People buying food and water while the power is out. Still, you’d almost rather be here with the store’s generator-powered AC than stuck in your house, which you know is cooking. Julian, your manager, finds you.
“Could’ve used you on time today, Keeper.”
You gesture back to the road. “You got any way to clear about a thousand trees, lemme know.” You lost a tooth five months ago. There’s another molar throbbing in your jaw, but you haven’t had the money to go to the dentist to see about getting it pulled. It gives you this faggy, wisping lisp that you hate, especially in conversations with the doughy Julian, a guy you would beat up on a playground if adults could do such things.
“We’re telling people, maximum of two bags,” he says. “But I want you stocking for now.”