Lightning on the River

Margaret stood on her back porch, watching seven-year-old Emma crouched behind the rhododendrons, smartphone pressed to her ear like a walkie-talkie. 'Agent Fox to Base,' Emma whispered dramatically. 'Target acquired.' Margaret's heart did a little flutter—that same flutter she'd felt sixty years ago, kneeling in the tall grass beside her brother Henry.

They'd been spies then, too, or so they'd convinced themselves. Every summer afternoon found them creeping through the milkweed behind the old Miller place, gathering intelligence on who was courting whom, which families had received letters from sons overseas, secrets that drifted like dandelion seeds through their small town. Henry, with his serious dark eyes and knobby knees, had always taken their mission more seriously. 'We're protecting America, Mags,' he'd say, adjusting his imaginary fedora.

The afternoon of the great storm—the one everyone still talked about at the hardware store—they'd been down by the river, tracking what they believed (incorrectly, as it turned out) to be a German operative. The sky had turned that peculiar greenish-gray that makes the hairs on your arms stand up. Margaret could smell it now, the damp earth and impending rain, the way the air grows heavy and thick before something breaks.

Then came the lightning—not jagged bolts but great sheets of it, illuminating the whole river valley in ghostly flashes. The water, normally so placid and brown, churned beneath the charcoal sky. Henry grabbed her hand. 'Run,' he said, and they did, stumbling through brambles, breathless with fear and something else—the electric knowledge that they were small, wonderfully small, in a world so much larger than their spy games.

They made it to the porch just as the heavens opened. Their mother wrapped them in quilts, pressed warm mugs of cocoa into their hands. 'You two,' she'd said, but she was smiling. 'One day you'll tell your grandchildren about running from storms.' She was right, of course. Mothers usually are.

Emma came trotting up the porch steps now, her spy mission complete. 'Grandma, Grandpa says you used to play by the river when you were little.' Margaret opened her arms to her granddaughter, who smelled of sunshine and grape jelly and childhood—the sweetest perfume in the world. 'I did,' she said. 'And your Great-Uncle Henry and I were the very best spies.'