The Lightning Season

I ran my fingers through Elena's hair for the last time before the first chemo appointment. Three years of growing it out after the divorce—she'd said it made her feel like herself again. Now it was all going, and I was the one holding the scissors in our bathroom at 7 AM on a Tuesday.

"Just cut it all off," she said, meeting my eyes in the mirror. "If it's going to fall out anyway, I'd rather choose how it goes."

My hands shook. I'd proposed to this woman in this bathroom. We'd bought this house together. Now I was giving her a buzz cut before radiation.

The summer after treatment ended, we tried to return to normal. Our neighbor Mike kept inviting us to his amateur baseball league games—something we'd done together in the early years, before everything got complicated. "Fresh air, sunshine," he'd say. "You two need to get out of that house."

So we went, sitting in the metal bleachers with a cooler of Elena's now-allowed beer. Her hair was growing back—soft fuzz at first, then curls, darker than before. She ran her hand over it constantly, like she couldn't believe it was real.

"You're staring," she said, not looking away from the field.

"I'm not."

"You are. Does it look weird?"

"It looks like you survived."

She turned then, and something in her face shifted. Not better, not worse—just different. Lightning cracked across the sky, sudden and jagged, illuminating everything for half a second before the boom.

"Do you remember," she asked, "what you said when I found the lump?"

The memory surfaced uninvited: her terrified voice, my arms around her in the kitchen, the words I'd whispered without thinking: "We'll get through anything. I'm not going anywhere."

But I had thought about leaving. Not during treatment, never then—but before, when the cancer was just fear and uncertainty, when I'd lain awake beside her wondering if I was strong enough for what was coming.

"You said you'd stay," she said now, as the rain began to fall and the other spectators scattered. "But you wanted to go, didn't you?"

The score was 3-2. It had been a good game.

"For about three minutes," I said. "Then I remembered that hair grows back. Lightning strikes. And some things are worth weathering."

She didn't respond, just leaned into my shoulder as the storm broke around us. Her curls were damp against my neck. We stayed until the umpires called the game, watching water puddle on the bases, neither of us moving until the stadium lights flickered and died.