Be Ready for the Lightning Read online

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2017 Grace O’Connell

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2017 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  O’Connell, Grace, 1984-, author

  Be ready for the lightning / Grace O’Connell.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780345811776

  eBook ISBN 9780345811783

  I. Title.

  PS8629.C58B4 2017 C813’.6 C2016-908179-6

  Cover and book design by Andrew Roberts

  Cover photo: © Trinette Reed / Getty Images

  v4.1

  a

  For Joseph—

  The best, brightest, and most unexpected

  lightning that has struck my life

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  One

  Before

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Part Two

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Part Three

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Part Four

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Part Five

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  After

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Part Six

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Part Seven

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Part Eight

  Thirty

  Acknowledgements

  “When you come for me next year, Peter—you will come, won’t you?”

  —J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up

  ONE

  I’ve never been shot. I’ve never even seen a gun up close, other than my father’s hunting rifles up at the cabin. And those old .22s, with their wooden stocks, are more like something from Davey Crockett than Quentin Tarantino.

  He took Conrad into the woods to shoot sometimes—my dad, not Quentin Tarantino. Muffled booms from deep in the trees. It was just pop cans off stumps, and once, on a whim, the slowest, dumbest rabbit. Tears from Connie afterwards.

  They didn’t invite me into the woods to shoot. It wasn’t because I’m a girl. Just an assumption that I wouldn’t have wanted to go. They were right. I wouldn’t have.

  —

  I get on the city bus that day in April after running three blocks down Fifth Avenue, along the side of Central Park. I’ve been in New York a couple of months already, but there’s still a part of me, a dorky tourist part, that can only think I’m running down Fifth Avenue. I’m running beside Central Park as I go. A numbskull commentary of the obvious.

  I’m wearing my shoes that got ruined in the rain. They’re half-slipping off my feet, but the bus is almost at the stop, so I run past souvenir stands and lemonade carts and a pile of seemingly discarded blue wooden slats telling me sternly, “Police Line Do Not Cross.” It’s unseasonably hot in Manhattan, and I’m sweating in my pits, down my back and a little where my bra meets my skin.

  On the bus, there isn’t an open seat except where I would have to really squeeze in beside someone, which I don’t like, so I just stand. I hang from the clammy pull-down handle, swinging and swaying around. I bump into a moustached man beside me and apologize.

  He says, “Don’t worry dear,” and my homesick heart gives a little jump, because that is something my dad would say, the dear. I can almost hear him saying it, the faded Irish lilt buttering the edges of his voice. When I’m away from them, I miss a version of my parents that doesn’t really exist, a sort of cuddly perfect-family nostalgia. Maybe I’m not the only one; maybe this is why people leave, move on, put distance between themselves and where they’re from—so they can miss a Vaseline-lens version of things.

  Central Park goes on forever. Just before we pass by the Met and its grand entrance, a crowd of kids gets off the bus with a woman herding them, probably a teacher. There’s a playground peeking out above the stone wall of the park. I don’t know why—I don’t get sappy about kids usually—but it makes me smile.

  After the kids go, there’s enough room to sit, but I don’t bother. Neither does the moustache man. I feel attached to him, as if we are friends. I do this with strangers all the time. I do it with cars that I drive behind on the highway for a long time. I get sad when they exit.

  A tall guy, one of those slab-of-meat Russian types, gets on the bus and sits down in one of the spaces vacated by the children. He’s talking loudly into a cell phone.

  “Yeah, I’m on the M1 now, I’ll be there when I’m there, it’s good. Doesn’t matter, anyway, she wouldn’t even let me pick him up, like picking him up is something so big, too big for me apparently. It’s some bullshit, but what am I supposed to do? I got my mom to do it, apparently that was okay, even she wouldn’t say no to my mom—”

  A professorial-looking man across the aisle makes a shh sound and says, quietly, “Could you keep your voice down? You’re disturbing everyone.”

  Without even moving the phone away from his mouth, the first man says, even louder, “Don’t tell me to shh, I ain’t disturbing anyone but you.” The two of them glare at one another for a second, and I get tense all over. I hate fights. There is that swollen, pre-storm feeling that crackles between men sometimes. Then the smaller guy drops his eyes, and the loud one returns to his call, and there is an air of relief and emasculation around the man who complained.

  In the seat in front of him, two teenagers are taking photos of each other with a phone.

  The girl says, “What’s it called? Photographic memory? I totally want that.”

  And the boy says, “Anyone can do it, it’s easy.”

  “No, it’s not, you have to be born with it.”

  “No, you can learn it. You need these special lights, and there’s a book that teaches you how. My sister told me about it.”

  At this the girl looks cowed, impressed. Then the boy points the phone at her, and she smiles again.

  I’m looking out the window, somewhere in the lower fifties or upper forties, watching a man take a photo of his wife on the sidewalk as she pantomimes throwing her umbrella into a trash can. I picture them torturing their nieces and nephews with a computer slideshow of those photos, when they get home. Why take a picture like that? Celebrating the end of the rain, the beautiful day? I guess I opted for the bus over the subway for the same reason, and because I don’t like being underground, and because I’m not in a hurry.

  I haven’t been in a hurry since I got to New York. I’m filling my hours, wandering around, tutoring kids who are either too dumb for me to ever get them where their anxious parents want them to end up, or too smart to need me. I prefer the dumb ones. I can comfort them, an
d some of them have already developed appealing compensations for their dumbness—humour or charm or self-deprecation. They know that they’re not going to make their parents happy. The smart ones are sadder, more desperate. They want to be even smarter than they are; they are already worried about being anything less than perfect.

  One girl asked me to write a college essay for her. I was confused, because she’s one of the brightest kids I tutor. I knew whatever she wrote would be good. “Not good enough,” she said, her perfectly smooth hands twisting together on the dining room table. “I’ll pay you. I have my own account. How much do you want?” Sounding slightly manic, she started listing the things she could give me: this purse or that cell phone; she could give me her brand-new laptop and tell her parents she lost it; did I want her coat, her shoes, her dresses? I didn’t take her money or her stuff, but it wasn’t because it would have been wrong. It was because I could tell this girl didn’t have it in her to lie well, to lie blandly and in that small way lies need to be told in order to be believed. That she would panic and throw me under the bus, when her parents said, “Is that what really happened?” That she was still missing the slightly rotten thing I’d found in myself that keeps you calm and flat when you should be sorry.

  —

  In Midtown, a guy gets on wearing a checked shirt under a long, heavy coat. His thin legs poke out from shorts below the coat, sport socks yanked up above tennis shoes. It is a heartbreaking outfit, a clash of boy and man. He must be so hot. Also, he’s sort of good-looking, despite the weird clothes, one of those dark honey blonds, sharp-nosed with the sort of finely veined skin that looks like it would bruise easily.

  After the door closes behind him, just as the bus begins to pull away from the curb, he reaches into his jacket and takes out a gun, leans over the fare box, around the Plexiglas shield, and points it at the driver’s head. The gun is big and sort of rectangular, like a cell phone from the ’80s.

  “Stop the bus,” he says.

  I only see and hear this because I’m close to the front; I’m already looking at him. He couldn’t be more than thirty, if that, the same age as me. The driver slams on the brakes, the bus lurches to a halt, and my body goes forward and then back. I bump into the moustache man again, who says, “Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’m not made of glass,” even though I didn’t say anything this time. He’s behind me and hasn’t yet seen the man with the gun. But an older woman in front of me, sitting in the courtesy seats, has, and she is making small noises.

  “Pull it right over to the curb,” says the man, “and put your hands on your head. Don’t speak on your radio. Please.” His voice is lower than you’d expect from his size, his looks. A baritone, a radio voice.

  Some people behind me are grumbling and saying, “What the fuck?” because they don’t know why the bus has stopped. And all of this so far has taken only seconds. The driver puts the bus in gear and it trundles to the right. One wheel goes up on the curb, and more passengers yell. What the fuck. Is this idiot drunk? Jesus Christ. The driver puts his hands on his head, and I can just see a scrap of his elbow jutting out to the side.

  “Put it back in park,” says the man, and the driver does so, the elbow dipping out of sight momentarily. I can hear him speaking now. He says, “Just walk off, just go home. You’re okay, man, you’re okay. It’s nothing, really, nothing at all.”

  I’m not really thinking anything right now. In the morning, I’d been walking around in the Met feeling strangely disconnected, as if I’d gone deaf. I was still worrying, irrationally, that what happened to my ear in B.C. had damaged my hearing, though logically I knew that my zonked feeling was probably just a hangover from the bar night I’d just had for my birthday with Al and Marie. I got the Met tickets from the parents of a boy I’m tutoring who’s wonderfully rich and woefully stupid. Technically, you can go to the museum for free, but they ask you to buy a ticket—you can choose any price, or none at all. The idea of just ignoring the request and swanning in without paying was too intimidating, but paying for a free museum seemed wasteful on my limited budget. The pre-paid ticket was easy, anonymous. If I told Annie that, she’d make fun of me. Spineless. I know it.

  On the bus, in this moment, it’s too quick. The whole thing seems like something that is happening but also not happening. I feel like I’m floating. I still have the little metal badge from the Met clipped to the neckline of my dress, a summer dress I’m wearing, because it is so oddly warm today. The only tiny working corner of my brain theorizes that this might be some sort of extreme ad campaign or maybe a movie shoot (how, somehow). Or something terribly strange but legitimate, allowed. It can’t be real.

  The gunman steps back a little, blinks a few times. He looks at the Plexiglas barrier that half-shields the driver’s seat. Then he shoots the driver in the head.

  TWO

  In the dream, I bumped up against the ceiling like a helium balloon. No one else could see me; the invisibility was the important thing in the dream, more magical than the flying, which seemed natural, like swimming.

  I flew down from my bedroom into the living room of our wooden house: the rust-coloured shag carpet and wood-burning fireplace that needed to be swept out, a squat RCA television perched above the VCR, plaid couches. Outside, the dim Kitsilano evening held its breath, while I floated by.

  I flew downstairs and checked on my family, calmly, like running an errand. There was no sound. The scene wasn’t muted flatly like on a TV, though—it was more like being underwater.

  My parents were there, still awake, and my older brother, Conrad, who was allowed to stay up an hour later than me and whose blood might already have contained all the wild destruction to come. But then, in the dream, they were safe and counted, counted by the invisible floating me, Veda. Through the back of my cotton nightie, I could just feel the popcorn ceiling that my dad would sand off later, when it went out of style. My parents were watching a detective show, and Conrad was reading a Louis Sachar novel that would one day be mine. All the anxiety poured out of me then, seeing them content, unbroken. It was replaced with a sleepy peacefulness, a feeling of being pulled back—reeled back, maybe—to my bed. And underneath that, a tiny flutter of pride, as if I had managed this myself, protected them.

  The dream happened every night for years. I never told anyone about it, and then it stopped when I was, I don’t know, nine or ten. It’s all scrambled, all out of order, for me to have been so anxious about them way back then.

  I can’t remember if the dream became less frequent or if it just stopped cold. In fact, I didn’t remember the dream at all, or even that I had had it, for years, more than twenty years. I just forgot it, like I forget a lot of things. I’ve always been forgetful. Sometimes it’s by accident: I lose all my sunglasses; I’ve lost my keys a bunch of times. I nearly drove my parents insane losing retainers (I still don’t know where I was leaving them). But I’m forgetful on purpose too, when I want to be. I think of it as The Wiping Away Thing. It’s a way of forgetting things you don’t want to remember. When something bad happened, I did my best to wipe it out of my mind. And then it would be like the thing never happened at all. But a vague discomfort would be left behind, a small and puzzling limp.

  I tried to focus on what was okay, what was all right. It was like wiping condensation from a bathroom mirror.

  Because of The Wiping Away Thing, I’ve had people tell me I come across as cold, uptight, snobbish, all that stuff, because I don’t get very emotional. Or sometimes it’s turned around into a compliment: together, calm. Polite, well-raised. My parents got a lot of compliments like that, when I was small. When I got older, it was the same. Pristine was my favourite one, a word a guy once used, after sex, in the context of How can you look so. There was an untouchable aspect to that—I liked it. He was offended, though. He wanted to leave a mark.

  Part of it, the way people react to me, is just because I’m a little bit pretty. A little bit, not a lot. You’re not supposed to say things l
ike that, but you can’t be a girl and not be aware of at least roughly how pretty or not pretty you are, because people always want to talk about it. They always want to point it out to you, like it’s a public service. You’re actually kind of pretty, you know. Like it’s some big favour, the concession.

  Conrad, on the other hand, is not just kind of anything. He’s gorgeous, and he’s an interesting kind of gorgeous, not just dumb-white-boy-gorgeous. I don’t know if that’s a weird thing to say about my own brother, but I was jealous for a long time—what’s the point of a boy being so good-looking? It would have done more good going to me. There’s plenty a girl can do with being that good-looking, but men can do just as well with charm or money or charisma. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is, and I thought nature had made an illogical choice with us. Poor planning.

  Other than the fact that we both have dark hair and eyes, Conrad and I look like our parents’ features were parcelled out for us like kickball teams being chosen. He got Dad’s height; I’m small like mom. He looks pretty much entirely Korean, whereas everyone I meet thinks I’m just white, though the kind of white that they like to guess about—Italian? Greek? Are you part Indigenous? You’re something, right? People never think we’re brother and sister, or if they know, they think Conrad is adopted. They never think I’m adopted. If I was out alone with my mom as a kid, people assumed she was my nanny. She tried to have a sense of humour about it, but that stuff gets old pretty fast. She never spoke Korean to us, though she had a few friends in the neighbourhood she would talk to in a low voice, the language I couldn’t understand flowing smoothly from her lips. I would ask her “What’s this in Korean?” about some object—my nose, a flower. Sometimes she would sound the word out for me, and some days she would get angry and snap at me.