lightning strike

chapter 10

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The decline from such heights began later that night, a moment of all moments that would split time into how things were before and how they were after. It was not a precipitous decline, or at least it would not be so until many years from then, but I am convinced that what happened that night was the catalyst for when it eventually became more precipitous all the same, and I was the only one who really saw or understood what happened.

A short time after my ballyhoo, a considerable breeze had picked up. We hurriedly gathered up the tablecloths, plates, and other dinnerware from the picnic tables that had been left outside from the clam bake and Chicago hot dogs and brought them into the house. Minutes later, a sweeping wall of rain so potent and thick it could be seen rolling across the twilight of the lake made its way over the lawn and the house. Lightning flashed from the western end of the lake, and I counted not five seconds before the thunder.

As a guest of the Goodspeeds, I was raised to help my host in the clearing of the table or otherwise offer myself as useful in any way possible when chores needed to be done. I was constantly doing this at the Goodspeed household and was always denied by Mrs. Goodspeed, who did the clearing and cleaning up of dinner with the speed and efficiency of someone who did not have to work on their feet all day (as my own mother did), and in general did not seem to need my help. In my house, it was my father or me who did the dishes, and although Mr. Goodspeed scoffed when I did so and told me to let her “have at it,” I always offered anyway.

The trip to the lake house was no exception. While paper plates and dinnerware may have been more appropriate for the outdoor occasion, the Goodspeeds chose to use traditional stoneware, silverware, and glasses. We placed them on the counter by the sink. As usual, Mrs. Goodspeed was the one who had taken it upon herself to clean the dishes.

“Do you want some help with those, Mrs. Goodspeed?” I asked. I was already scraping off leftovers from the plates into the trash.

“Jude, you’re such a sweetie. No, honey, I got it,” she said, and began to rinse the plates.

The wind outside intensified; it was quite a storm. I wondered how the Goodspeeds had gone through the day without any one of them mentioning the impending inclement weather. Did they know, or did they just not care?

Mrs. Goodspeed took a fork dirtied with potato salad and stuck it beneath the faucet, at the same time reaching over to grab the stainless-steel handle of the dishwasher.

I am not sure if what I saw next was real or not. It seemed real at the time, but whenever I remember it, the memory retreats further into some blurry place in my mind where I can no longer recall it and know for certain what I saw, and with each passing year I doubt it more and more despite the mounting evidence to the contrary:

A few stray tendrils of Mrs. Goodspeed’s hair rose behind her, as if lifted by a ghost.

What happened next was definitely real because it was experienced by everyone else in the house as well.

A bright flash of lightning pierced the kitchen from the window above the sink. I reflexively turned to shield myself from it. There was an almighty bang, louder than all the fireworks over the lake combined, the kind of thunderous boom you only hear the few times in your life you find yourself almost directly beneath a lightning strike.

I cowered in the wake of the thunder, a rumble that shook the whole house, and when I turned back toward the sink, I saw Mrs. Goodspeed on the ground, her head rested on the kitchen island cabinetry and her feet splayed toward the sink.

“Mrs. Goodspeed!” I called out, my voice cracking.

The rest of the Goodspeeds were wowed by the lightning strike, as though it were an exotic visitor for their entertainment, a demonstration of the mightiness of nature performed just for them. Mr. Goodspeed, though, heard the concern in my voice.

“Kathy?!” He ran to the kitchen and knelt beside her, taking her hands. “Kathy! What happened?”

“She got struck by the lightning!” I blurted out. The rest of the family congregated around us. Tommy came to my side and Waldo, tail-wagging, came to lick Mrs. Goodspeed in the face.

Mr. Goodspeed looked up at me with narrowed eyes. “Struck by the lightning?”

“Yeah!” I said. “I saw it!”

“Impossible,” Grandpa Goodspeed said, entering the kitchen.

“No, no, I’m okay,” Mrs. Goodspeed said, Waldo having seemingly brought her back to life. Mr. Goodspeed helped her up. “The thunder just startled me, and I must have… fallen backward. I hit my head, I think,” she said, rubbing it. Her hair looked normal.

“You think?” Mr. Goodspeed asked. He was not a man who liked ambiguity.

“Well, it doesn’t hurt, actually,” she said, rubbing it again. “I feel like I’m in a daze.”

“Are you concussed maybe?” Aunt Liz asked. She had taken up position alongside Mr. Goodspeed as the most compassionate of the group. I looked at Tommy. He was transfixed by his mother, like he’d just seen an immortal god impaled and bloodied. She leaned against the granite countertop.

“Where are we? Do you remember falling?” Mr. Goodspeed demanded.

“We’re at your family’s house on Kinderhook Lake,” she indulged with a smile. “The one you wish was on Sacandaga instead.”

“She seems fine,” Grandpa Goodspeed laughed.

“Do you remember falling?” Mr. Goodspeed followed up.

“I remember Jude asking if I needed help and then…I remember hearing thunder and being on the ground,” she said, frowning.

“What makes you think she got struck by the lightning, Jude?” Aunt Liz asked, feeling her sister-in-law’s pulse with her fingers.

“I saw…” I started, gulping back my explanation. It seemed insane to describe how her hair had seemed to be lifted by static. “I’m not sure. It happened at the same time as the lightning, I think. Her falling.”

“Could have just scared her,” Grandpa Goodspeed said. “Hell of a bang.”

“I think Jude’s right, I think Mom got struck by lightning!” Tommy piped up.

“I think I’d know if I got struck by lightning, don’t you think?” his mom said.

“It is possible though,” Aunt Liz said.

“No, it’s not,” Mr. Goodspeed said.

“It’s not,” said one of his brothers.

“It is, I read a book where that happened one time! You can totally get struck by lightning through running water!” Tommy said.

The rest of the Goodspeeds chipped in with equal incredulity and conjecture until Grandpa Goodspeed (who I was beginning to see was a powerful patriarch indeed) once again shouted: “ENOUGH!” He put his hand on his daughter-in-law’s shoulder. “Nothing matters except for how Kathy feels. Are you okay, Kathy? Should we take you to urgent care or the emergency room?”

“No! No, definitely not. I’m not sure what happened but honestly, I feel fine. Strange, but…just a little bump on my head,” she said, examining her hands for some reason. “Thank you for the concern, everyone. But I promise I’m fine. How about we get dessert going?”

The matter was forgotten by most, and we had chocolate cream pie for dessert. Mr. Goodspeed and Tommy continued to watch her for any signs of illness, none of which were forthcoming, as far as I could tell.

I’d later learn that Mr. Goodspeed took her to a doctor the next day, who gave her a thorough examination and found no signs of concussion or brain trauma.

But Mrs. Goodspeed began to slowly change from that day on, and the nature of her change left little doubt that—lightning strike or not—something happened to her during that storm at the lake house, and it would interrupt the fate of lives beyond her own and her family’s.

I can’t help but think: what if I had been washing the dishes and not her?

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That night, Tommy and I slept in a small room with bunk beds. Tommy insisted that I take the top bunk, because for some reason he perceived it to be the better choice and, as the guest, I should absolutely get the better choice.

We played one of my favorite games, which was one Tommy never knew we were playing and therefore one I finally stood a chance of winning, a game I played on many sleepovers with Tommy called ‘Wait for Tommy to Shut Up So We Can Go to Sleep.’

“Did you know that Kinderhook is the origin of the word ‘okay’? Like, one of the most common words in the English language and they started saying it because of here. Because of Martin Van Buren. When he was running for president, they used to say he and his inner circle were ‘O.K.’ which stood for Old Kinderhook, because that’s where he was from, Martin Van Buren, he was from Kinderhook. And if you were ‘Old Kinderhook,’ it meant you were basically a good old boy, like someone who was in on it, a cool kid basically, because you’d been there, and everyone knew you. So, they were saying O.K. in all the papers and stuff and it kind of just caught on as like a shorthand for ‘good person’ or ‘in-person’ or even just fine in general.”

“Interesting,” I said. The key to winning ‘Wait for Tommy to Shut Up So We Can Go to Sleep’ was to engage as little as possible.

“I guess me and my family are Old Kinderhook. But you’re O.K. now too, Jude. Totally okay. A-okay, I’d even say.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I wish everyone could be O.K,” he said. I couldn’t think of anything to say to that other than that I agreed with him.

He was silent for a minute, and I thought I won the game, but then: “I hope Grandpa talks to my dad. I really don’t want to go to Albany Academy. I’m sure it’s full of preps who haven’t read a book in their life. No one interesting. No one with a story. Not even people who have moved, not like you, Jude. Not anyone who was named after a Beatles song. Unless they’re, like, a rich person from abroad or something, maybe that’d be interesting. Someone who is like, I don’t know, the son of a South African diplomat or a French businessperson. Why they’d come to Albany, I don’t know, but at least they’d have something. No, though, it’s going to be a bunch of lacrosse-playing bro-head mouth-breathers who think they’re the shit. And there aren’t even any girls there and that totally blows too.”

I managed to parse from this spiel that I was wrong when I assumed I was not a reason Tommy wanted to stay in school at Veddersburgh. I was very much a reason. It was also nice to hear him attach a reason to his fondness for me (a happenstance uncommon among typically unforthcoming American pre-teen boy friendships), which was that he found me interesting, which was a reciprocation of why I was fond of him.

Is that all friendship is? People who find each other tolerably un-boring?

“I hope you don’t have to go there either,” I said, staring up at the ceiling and imagining him staring up at the top bunk upon which I lay.

Apparently, that was what Tommy needed to hear, because we were silent after that. The sun of the Fourth of July and the ballyhoos had sapped us of our pre-teen effervescence, our stomachs full of Chicago-style hot dogs and chocolate cream pie.

I thought that Mrs. Goodspeed was the only person with any influence over Mr. Goodspeed, but, as it turned out, Grandpa Goodspeed exerted considerable power as well, because when we went back to school after that summer, Tommy Goodspeed accompanied me as a freshman to Veddersburgh High School.

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next (come eat some ham)

previous (the big ballyhoo)