What Lightning Remembers

The orange slice floated in Marcus's drink, slowly melting into the whiskey as he sat by the hotel pool at midnight. The cable news channel droned from the bar television—another storm coming, another catastrophe somewhere—but he wasn't really watching.

He was thinking about the baseball glove buried in his closet, the one his father had given him two weeks before the accident. Twenty years later, and he still couldn't touch baseball without tasting copper in his mouth.

"You're going to miss your flight," Lauren said, sliding onto the stool beside him. Her dress was the same orange as that terrible sunset the day everything changed. She'd always had this way of showing up exactly when he was drowning.

"I changed it," Marcus said. "I'm staying through the weekend."

"You hate this city. You hate the memories here."

"I hate running more."

Lightning flickered across the sky—a quick, nervous flash like something trying to find its voice. The pool's surface shivered with the coming storm.

"Your dad would've been fifty next week," Lauren said softly. "I looked it up."

Marcus stared at his drink. "I know."

"You never talk about him. You never talk about that day."

"What's there to say? He threw me a baseball. I dropped it. He laughed, said 'your hands are too soft for this game,' and got in the truck. Then the cable snapped on the overpass, and—"

"And you've been punishing yourself ever since," she finished. "Marcus, it was a truck accident. Not a dropped ball. Not your hands being soft."

"I should've been with him. I should've—"

"Should've what? Died too?" She touched his arm, her fingers warm against his cold skin. "Your father loved you. The last thing he said about you was that you had the gentlest hands of anyone he'd ever known. That you'd never hurt a fly, let alone a baseball."

Marcus felt something crack open in his chest. "He said that?"

"At my wedding. Three months before he died." Lauren squeezed his hand. "You've been carrying this wrong story for twenty years. Let it go."

The storm broke then—real lightning this time, brilliant and terrifying, illuminating everything. Rain swept across the pool in sheets.

"I don't know how," Marcus whispered.

"Start by not running," she said. "Stay here. Drink that terrible whiskey. Tell me something good about him. Something that doesn't end with an accident."

Marcus thought for a long moment. Then, finally: "He used to catch fireflies with me. He'd say their lights were little pieces of lightning we could hold in our hands without getting burned. He said gentle hands were made for that kind of work."

Lauren smiled through the rain. "There. That's the story. That's the one."

The storm raged around them, but for the first time in twenty years, Marcus wasn't drowning. He was just a man in the rain, finally learning how to breathe.