Alice Hoffman Read online

  I wiped my hands on my new dress and got back into the car. I drove a little farther, then stopped when I could see the house. It was nothing special. An old farmhouse with a tin roof. The rain, when it came, surely sounded like shotgun pellets; hail, when it fell, surely hammered away. I sat in my car for forty minutes, the exact amount of time he’d been dead. I wanted to get a feel for how long it had been, if that was possible. Could forty minutes be an eternity? Could you walk into fear as one person and come back as someone else entirely? I thought about the morning when I woke up and my mother was gone. The ice on the window glass. The slant of the sunlight. My brother cleaning the kitchen, his back to me. Go back to bed, he’d said. It’s too early. And so I had. I’d dreamed of snow and ice until I heard my grandmother calling my name.

  Now I was in a place where there were white oranges in a field. Where there were thin wisps of high clouds. I still felt the wish I had made so long ago. It had been there all along, settled in my chest, in the place where my heart should have been, just below my strike mark.

  All I wanted was to be somebody else. Was that asking too much? Was that asking for everything? That’s why I was here. It was already happening, just by driving fifty miles. The person I’d been would have never approached a stranger’s front door and knocked, not once but three times. Once for ice. Twice for snow. Three for the tires on the road.

  Everything smelled hot; dust rose up and burned my nose each time I breathed in. I was someplace where there had never been ice. Where a January day was the same as July. Like the roofer who’d cried, I needed to know the difference between what was real and what was a dream. I pinched myself to see if it hurt. By the time I let go there was a raised mark on my skin. I figured it was red. That was a good sign.

  I was ready to get what I deserved.

  II

  In chaos theory, does it matter what color the butterfly is? Would something entirely different have happened next if I hadn’t been color-blind? Would Lazarus Jones have opened the door if the dress I’d worn was white, as I thought it was, rather than red, as it was in anyone else’s eyes?

  This is what he told me he saw from the upstairs window that first time I went to see him: A woman in a red dress standing on the porch. Out of place, out of time, steadily knocking on the door. Somebody who seemed intent on getting inside. He usually kept the shades drawn when people came looking for him. He had chased Dr. Wyman off with a gun, true enough. He wasn’t interested in visitors. He didn’t even talk to his own field-workers. But the red dress caught his eye. That’s what he told me later. Maybe I reminded him of the fruit in his orchard on the day lightning struck. Something he hadn’t expected and couldn’t quite stop.

  As for me, I was ready for anything. I thought I might explode, the way I had when I shoved my hand through the window. I told myself if he didn’t come out of the house in five minutes, I would leave. Maybe I was indeed getting exactly what I deserved: nothing. A few minutes more and I probably would have been grateful for the opportunity to turn and run, the way I always had before. But I hadn’t planned what I’d do next. Leave and do what? Drive off the Interstate into a canal? Jump from a cliff? Go home, lie down on the couch, look at the ceiling fan? All I knew is that I wanted to fly away. I wanted to be something brand-new. I felt like those human beings in fairy tales who suddenly find themselves in another creature’s skin, trapped in sealskin, horsehide, feathers.

  Lazarus Jones came out to the porch. I looked down at the ground. If he saw the expression on my face, I’d scare him off. Had I looked into a mirror, I would have frightened myself. I was desperate, you know. I was mired in death and wishes, trapped in the wrong skin. I was the donkey, ugly and braying, the goose girl asking for mercy, the beggarman in need of a crust of bread. The straps of my dress were falling off my shoulders. I didn’t care. Dust was on my face and on my fingers. He’d had forty minutes of knowing everything; all I wanted was a little piece of what he’d learned on the other side. I didn’t want to dissect him or photograph him or measure the radioactivity under his skin. I just wanted to be in the presence of a man it was impossible to kill.

  There were birds overhead and I saw their shadows float by on the porch floorboards. It hurt to breathe. I should have apologized for intruding, or told him that I’d come a far distance only to ask how afraid I should be of death. I should have told him that the worst thing in the world is a wish that comes true. But I remained silent, the way I had so many times before.

  “Who told you to come here?” he said.

  What was I supposed to say? Fate? A butterfly on the other side of the world? The donkeyskin I wore, so itchy, so ill-fitting? An eight-year-old girl who breathed out one wish and changed everything?

  “Are you trying to interview me, or something?” he wanted to know. He came over and took my arm. Did he test for lies this way? Could he feel a betrayal as easily as he could stop clocks?

  His touch was so hot I almost fainted. But that might not have been about lightning.

  “I’m just a librarian, not a reporter. From Orlon. I just wanted to see you for myself. They talked about you in my lightning group. They said you died and came back and now you’re not afraid of anything. So why would you care whether or not I was here? You’re not afraid, are you?”

  Those were more words all strung together than I’d said in years. It was exhausting to talk. I felt as though I’d had to pull each word out of my throat, like stones I’d swallowed, with sharp edges.

  Jones looked at me more carefully now that he understood I’d been struck. I wasn’t just anyone, some busybody who had no idea of what he’d been through. He let go of my arm.

  “If they say that about me, they’re idiots. And if I wasn’t afraid of anything I’d be one, too.”

  He was studying me, up and down. I felt too hot. I remembered I was in Florida. I remembered it would never snow here. I could be honest. To a point.

  “My strike affected my left side,” I said. “Nerve damage. Some cardiac damage as well. And I can’t see the color red.”

  He laughed out loud; for a moment, his whole face changed.

  “Is that funny?” I asked.

  He stopped laughing. Stared at me. “Maybe.”

  “You’re not going to pull a gun on me like you did to Dr. Wyman?”

  “It wasn’t loaded,” Lazarus told me. “He ran before finding that out.”

  What no one had mentioned about Lazarus Jones was that he was beautiful. Younger than I was; twenty-five or thirty, I couldn’t tell. His eyes were dark, darker than mine. I wondered if whatever he’d learned in those forty minutes had turned him to ash. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt and old jeans, work boots. His hair was dark and he hadn’t had it cut in some time; it was longer than mine. When he stared there was something hot in his gaze, as though he could burn you alive if he wanted to. If you gave him a reason.

  “Well, you’re here,” Lazarus said. “What do you want?”

  This sounded like a trick question to me. If I answered incorrectly, perhaps I would turn into ash myself. Burned alive.

  We stared at each other. Putting my hand through glass was nothing compared with this. I was in this moment, no other time. Now when I thought about New Jersey it was like remembering a mythological country.

  You had to do the thing you were most afraid of, didn’t you? In every fairy tale the right way was the difficult path, the one that led over boulders, through brambles, across a field of fire. I took a step forward and looped my arms around Lazarus Jones’s neck so I could be near him. Every person had a secret, this was mine: I couldn’t begin anything that remotely resembled a life until I understood death.

  Lazarus Jones smelled like sulfur. People with sense run away from fire, but not me.

  “Now that you’ve done it once, are you afraid to do it again?”

  In response, he pulled me closer, just for an instant. For that time I didn’t hear the clicking in my head, not one snap. I didn’t smell orange
s or feel the gritty dust.

  “That’s for me to know. I’m not sure you want to find out.”

  He let go and started walking away. Then he stopped and turned around. I was still there. He hadn’t imagined me or gotten rid of me. Yet.

  “You want to know what I’m afraid of?”

  He cast a shadow along the yardspace between us. A dark shade. The sun was no longer blinding me. I could see right into his face. Maybe I nodded. I must have, because he spoke.

  “It’s the living that scares me most of all,” Lazarus Jones said.

  He went on then, inside his house. After he’d closed the door, I heard the lock click into place. I felt lost, standing there. Sweltering in the sun. It was so hot out no birds were in the sky. They were all perched in the shadows.

  A group of men were sitting in the shade as well, taking a break from picking oranges. One of them approached me as I walked back to my car. He was young, high-school age, tall and rangy. He had a curious, friendly expression and his hair was buzzed off. He reminded me of Renny, but he was healthy and strong; his hands were rough, covered with blisters. I wondered if the blisters caused him great pain. If he rubbed them with Vaseline. If some girl who loved him put his fingers in her mouth, healed him with a kiss.

  “Was that Jones you were talking to?” the boy asked me.

  “For a minute,” I said.

  “He never talks to any of us. He leaves what we’re owed out on the porch. Then the fruit distributor sends trucks out, and those guys have nothing to do with him, either. I never even saw him before today. You were up close. Was he all deformed, or something?”

  Deformed, no. Merely beautiful. But I didn’t think it was my place to comment if Jones wanted to keep himself locked away.

  “I couldn’t really tell.”

  “That’s what we all figure. He got hit by lightning and he’s all scarred up.”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Let us know if you find out. Maybe we’re all working for a fucking monster.” The boy laughed at that notion. “Maybe he’s a bloodsucking creature from beyond the grave.”

  “He wasn’t,” I said. Just beautiful, filled with ashes, shutting the door in my face. Only that.

  “But you couldn’t really tell,” the boy challenged me. “Could you?” The other guys were whistling for him, calling his name, so he headed back to them. “See ya,” he called as he ambled back into the shade.

  I got into my car and took off, but I was rattled. I pulled onto the Interstate going the wrong way and didn’t realize my mistake until I’d driven north for three exits. Orlon was to the south. Finally, I turned around and pulled off at a rest stop. I used the toilet and bought a bottle of water. The cashier complimented me on my red dress and then I realized why Lazarus Jones had laughed at my color blindness. I understood why the men in the gas station where I’d stopped before had whistled. They thought they knew who I was because of my red dress. I felt hot and confused; where he’d grabbed my arm heat blisters had risen. Where he’d whispered to me, my ear was burning.

  I went home, took off my dress, and hung it in the back of the closet. The next morning, when I went out to my car, I noticed that the odometer had stopped. I wondered if the malfunction had been brought on by proximity to Lazarus Jones. There was something wrong with me as well. Definitely caused by Lazarus. Wherever he had touched me I had little raised burn marks. I went to the Orlon University Health Center, to see the nurse who’d examined me for the lightning-strike study. He name was June Malone and she was a year or two younger than I.

  “You’ve missed a couple of meetings,” she said.

  “Have I?” Like I was ever going again. “These things actually hurt.” I showed her my arm.

  June gave me an ointment for my skin, but she seemed suspicious. Maybe it looked as though I’d mutilated myself, held a hot match to my flesh.

  “I’m sensitive,” I told her.

  “So I see.”

  “Seriously, the slightest thing affects me,” I assured her.

  “We need to report this to the study. Any new effect can be meaningful.”

  “Look, I’m not the type to be in a study. And don’t these studies benefit the clinicians and the scientists, not the patients?”

  I did agree to revisit the cardiologist, a fellow named Craven, who was in charge of my case but never seemed to recognize me. Thankfully, though, he recognized my heart. I suppose that was the important thing. I’d had a new electrocardiogram and Craven studied the results. He asked if my heart was racing. I admitted it was. I was given a prescription for nitroglycerin and told that when my heart started hurting I should slip a tablet under my tongue. I might occasionally experience angina brought on by the neurological and cardiac shock of the strike. Very common. I limped out of there with my ointment and my nitro, a commonplace wreck.

  I spied Renny as I was walking across the campus. It was the first week of summer school and he was taking Modern Architecture; that was his major. In all honesty I wanted to avoid him; I didn’t want a friend. But he spotted me and shouted out for me to wait, so I did.

  “Trying to sneak away?” Renny was wearing khaki shorts, sneakers, an Orlon University T-shirt, and his heavy leather gloves.

  “I was being treated for a disgusting little skin condition.” I showed him my arm. We sat down on a bench under a cabbage palm.

  “Want to trade?” he said. When he saw the look on my face he added, “I’m kidding. Just a little levity. No guilt if my effects are worse than yours. We’re beyond that. Fellow survivors and all.”

  I suppose as friends we suited each other in some strange way. He told me a little about his life — his parents were doctors in Miami, his younger sister was still in high school. The only thing he’d ever been interested in was building things; he’d been obsessed with architecture since the first time he played with blocks. Now with his hands afflicted, he worried that architecture might no longer be an option.

  Renny was only twenty-one, but he seemed older once he got to talking. He gazed at the other students passing by. I saw what was in his eyes. The others had no idea of what he’d been through. They were moving through a world in which people didn’t limp or have holes in their heads. In their universe no one wore gloves when the temperature climbed toward a hundred degrees. No one woke in the middle of the night, in pain, alone. A stranger in his own life.

  “Do you think every person has one defining secret?” Renny asked.

  I laughed, nursing my own most current secret, Lazarus Jones. “Don’t you think we’re more complex than that? Don’t we all have endless secrets?”

  “Little, bullshit ones. Sure. I don’t mean those. Who do you love? Who did you fuck? Everyone has them. I mean one defining secret. The essence of a person. If you figure that out, you figure out the riddle of that particular human being.”

  “Is this your way of getting me to confide in you?”

  “Maybe. Just give me one of your bullshit secrets. But be careful. That might make us friends.”

  I was surprised. Though he was a stranger to me, I’d thought he had assumed we were friends. Renny, it turned out, wasn’t easy to fool. I suppose he was used to people shrugging him off. The sun was in his face, blurring his features. All in all, Renny wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but not a single girl walking by had glanced at him. The limp, the withered foot, the hole in his head, the gloves. That’s what they saw.

  Would it hurt me to give him something? Just a tiny bit?

  “I went to see Lazarus Jones.”

  Renny stared at me, then threw his head back and laughed. He might have even chortled. “Now that is bullshit.”

  “Seriously. I did.”

  “Bullshit and crap. Times two.”

  “Fine. Don’t believe me.”

  “Yeah, well then, tell me. Did he really chase Wyman off with a gun?”

  “Unloaded. He didn’t want to be their lab rat.”

  “Wow. Sympathy for the devil. Ma
ybe you really did meet him.”

  “He’s not the devil. And I’m hardly sympathetic.” Now that was bullshit. “He owns an orange grove.” Enough of this. “Okay, so now give me one of your secrets.”

  “There’s one,” Renny said mournfully.

  I followed his gaze. Several young women were on their way to the dorms. Frankly, I couldn’t tell one from the other. They were all pretty and young.

  “The one on the left.”

  The blonde.

  “Iris McGinnis. She was in my art history class in the spring. She doesn’t know I’m alive. I’m insanely crazy about her.”

  “This isn’t your defining secret, is it?”

  Instead of answering, Renny said, “Look at her. No one will ever be in love with me.”

  “You’re not the only one in the world with a terrible love life. I’m right there with you.”

  There was no need for him to know about the policeman in the parking lot or my friends’ boyfriends in high school or the fact that I liked the way the burns on my arms felt, what they reminded me of. Sitting there with Renny, I wondered if choosing the red dress had been an accident. Was there a part of my brain that could still sense red, just as it sensed desire?

  When Renny went to class I walked to my car and headed for the library. I had decided to get the library records in order. It was the least I could do to make up for all my absences. I was taking Frances’s handwritten notations and entering them into the word processor. On each patron’s card Frances had painstakingly recorded every book he or she had checked out. There was one woman, for instance, who had withdrawn every book on architecture that we had, then had ordered more. I wondered if she’d be a possibility for Renny until I came to her birth date and discovered this particular patron was nearly eighty years old. No match, I supposed, for the beautiful Iris McGinnis.