Like Lightning

By Shae Krispinsky

Ren Thibodeaux, a senior at a women's college in southwest Virginia, runs. When she notices Navin Doss—twice her age, with a quiet, weatherworn demeanor—hunched over a bottle of Budweiser at her favorite dive bar, Ren believes she's found a reason to stop running. Coaxing her way into his life, Ren discovers Navin's moonshining isn't his only secret and the tragedies of his past are more complicated, and more present, than he cares to admit.

Part coming-of-age, part romance, part grit-lit, and part campus novel, "Like Lightning" coheres around Ren's singular narrative voice, both sardonic and sincere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667881287

Book preview

Chapter 1

Mara and Elle are my friends—what else to call them? We eat dinner together, huddle into a single car to head across town for a movie, bake cookies at three in the morning, and smoke up out behind our dorm building while watching for campus security—so I know they mean well whenever they try to set me up with some guy they know. Either of them would love to be offered a Cal or a Robbie from Virginia Tech or a Jesse from that punk band with two bassists and no guitar. Maybe they’ve already sampled them all. Maybe the Jesses and Robbies are the rejects, small cocks, bad breath, too cheap, whatever. Or maybe they’re being kind. Often Mara and Elle are in relationships, or are in the pursuit of them, and they see me surrounded by my books. They don’t want me to feel left out of their world, though they have little interest in entering mine.

At first, I tried to accommodate them, accepting a few dates but refusing seconds with anyone. I never understood the follow-up invitations. The initial dates weren’t good: blank stares and acres of never between me and the guy seated across the table. There was the time with Tyler. Trevor? Something with a T. He blinked a lot. He ate pizza and bought me never-ending razzamatinis, which I drank to amuse myself. At the end of the night, he blushed as he asked if he could call me the next day. I gave him a fake number. On another occasion, I met a guy at the park. He was a part-time body-builder—I have no idea how Mara found him. Sometimes I think she scours Craigslist for anything entertaining. He wanted to show me photos from his competitions he had saved on his phone. Oil-streaked pectorals, tight velvet bikinis and I was supposed to pretend I was interested in that shit? I suspect all his brains had dripped into his chest, since he found me online and sent me an email with a few more photos. Deleted, blocked. And those weren’t the most offensive ones.

Perhaps I’m seen as a challenge, something to crack open to get to the good inside, and that’s why the guys keep trying. Or maybe my silence makes me a vessel, utilitarian and non-threatening, into which they can pour themselves. Mara and Elle explain time and again that a smitten guy is not a thing to waste. It’s an opportunity, they say. I tell them I’m fine being alone, I prefer it. Being chased makes me feel like a dog who’s escaped her leash, and if that happens, good luck. There’s no getting me back. I can run faster than anyone when I want to, and I always want to. They express pity, comment that when I find the right person I’ll change my mind, and then return to their dating apps in search of the mythical guy who will make me stop running and appreciate the chain.

So later that week when the three of us are sitting in our booth at Community Inn, our favorite dive across town from campus, and I notice the back of a man at the bar, it surprises me that I keep eyeing him. I can’t see him, not really, not his face. He stays huddled over his beer bottle, a camouflage baseball cap low over his eyes. The way I can tell he’s older, maybe in his early forties, are the wisps of grey in the hair at his nape. I don’t know why he arrests me like this, handcuffing me just by the slope of his neck, a stooped shoulder and dusty skin, but I can’t stop looking. Stealing glances is the appropriate phrase. Something in him resonates with something in me.

What surprises me more is when Mara catches me eyeing him, instead of goading me on, encouraging me to go for it, she grimaces, and whispers that he’s track—she means drunk, like she is—and old, and probably smells, probably is missing a few teeth. It’s an overzealous renunciation, even for her. I mouth, What are you talking about? Disgusted, she turns away, ending the conversation until we’re in the car, secure against the night with the windows rolled up. Behind the wheel, Mara twists around to face me and asks what was up with the guy.

What guy? I ask back.

You know who I’m talking about. The alky in the flannel jacket.

From shotgun, Elle chimes in, You were watching him the entire night.

He wasn’t there that long, I shoot back as Mara starts the engine and swerves out of the parking lot. I peer out the window, yearning to catch sight of him one last time.

How would you know if you weren’t watching him? Mara teases. I can feel her peering at me in the rear-view mirror.

He seemed familiar is all, I say, hoping they’ll drop it. A redirection would help here. I can mention Cal—Mara’s ex, with whom she has a date tomorrow night—or Elle’s new catch, some shaggy blonde who stopped at CI for a few moments before heading back to work, or the bartender’s ugly new tattoo. Anything would work, but what I want, for the twenty-minute ride back to campus: silence. We rarely get what we want, but I’ll never stop hoping.

Blessed soul taking pity on me, Elle says, Let’s leave her alone. It doesn’t mean anything to look.

#

I return to CI the next night. I doubt the man is here. I’m right, but I take a seat at our back booth nonetheless. Ursula, the bartender with the tattoos, asks across the bar where my friends are.

I say, Mara’s got a date.

You meeting someone?

I shake my head. Just me.

She returns with a gin and tonic. You like these, right? Yes, I confirm, and she knuckle-raps the table: on her.

Feeling buzzy after my second freebie, I move to the bar, taking the seat the man had been sitting in last night. Ursula stops wiping glasses over by the kitchen and joins me.

Why are you really here? she asks with a slow smile as she leans her elbows on the bar. Her newest tattoo, Bettie Page in a sexy cat costume—ears, tail, whiskers, all of it—is scabby on her bicep. Break up with your boyfriend?

I say, Didn’t have one to break up with.

Ursula skewers a few cherries onto a plastic scimitar-shaped swizzle stick and hands them to me. Good to know, she says.

Emboldened by the emptiness of the bar, or the gin, I ask, Do you know who was sitting here last night?

Her face falls. What?

There was a guy, flannel jacket, hunting hat, in this seat. Drinking Budweiser.

With all softness gone from her voice, she says, Some guy. Navin? Yeah, I remember that because there’s a street in my hometown, Navin Avenue.

Does he come in often?

She starts wiping down the bar again. Sometimes. Not daily. Why?

I bite at my thumb. Just curious.

Hon, I know it’s none of my business, she offers, but I wouldn’t go chasing after trouble if I were you.

How do you know he’s trouble?

With a bitter grin, she says, All men are.

#

When I go back to CI on Monday, Ursula’s not there. Jules, the other bartender, doesn’t give me free drinks, but he doesn’t give me any grief either. I sit at the bar, pull a novel out of my purse. Holding it up, I ask, You mind? Again, the place is almost empty. There’s a couple in matching hoodies playing pool in the back and a guy chewing on a straw, flipping through the jukebox.

You drinking? Jules asks.

Gin and tonic, please.

I look up when I hear the door. The hat, the flannel. Navin. My instinct is to bury myself back in my book, not make eye contact, try to hide in plain sight. I never expected him to show. At least, not yet. I figured I’d have a few more weeks to prepare. Now here he is shuffling in with his head down and I don’t know what to do. He pauses. I’m in his seat. He sits next to me.

What’ll it be? Jules asks him.

Bud, bottle, Navin says.

Two words and I’m transported. No longer sitting in the shitty Community Inn, I’m winding up a mountainside in a beat-up pickup truck, the road coughing up grimy puffs around me, the sky above the trees splayed open. I’m in a mud-splattered white dress. My hair, unbound and free, whips across my face and flags out the window. I don’t know where I’m going, but I know there will be that late-night silence at the end, warm, comforting winds, and him drinking his piss-beer out of brown glass. We’ll be there together, in that place that feels comforting and right, the place I moved south to find. Virginia, concentrated. The hills and valleys, the trees, the sky.

I’ve felt this before. That’s why he struck me as so familiar. It wasn’t him but what he reminded me of: the calm, Appalachian idyll found in Meg Moreley’s Southern Graces photographs.

I found the collection the way I find everything that ends up meaning anything to me: random luck. Maybe you could call that fate. Throughout high school I, a nerdy loner of a girl more interested in Anne Sexton than sex, spent my free time at the small public library the next town over. I’d worked my way through all the books that interested me, from Thoreau to Anne Rice. Only I, it seemed, checked anything out. I liked the consistency, the lack of surprises. Four spines in on the second shelf in aisle G, that’s where I’d find On the Road, the copy worn through from my re-reading. Turning the corner, the exact middle book on the middle-bottom shelf: The Bell Jar. I could retrieve whatever I wanted in seconds, with eyes closed.

One afternoon in the spring of my junior year, I spotted something strange back behind the check-out counter. I inquired, pointing. The librarian, sucking her teeth and shaking her head, explained it was a request, a special order, but after perusing it, she didn’t feel comfortable putting it into circulation. It’s inappropriate, she whispered in disgust. Still shaking her head, she walked away. I darted around and grabbed the slim, over-sized volume with a photograph of a small child, perhaps three or four with hair long, blonde, and curly, seated alone on a wooden pew in an unadorned country church. In a modest cream Garamond font: Southern Graces – Meg Moreley.

I scurried to my favorite reading spot, a low slipper chair with rough, mustard upholstery pushed up next to the library’s back wall of tinted smoke-grey glass, half-hidden by a plastic ficus in a fraying woven pot and opened the book. A single sepia-toned black and white photograph, 8x10, filled each page. There were a handful of images of the girl from the cover, more of her in the church, and a few with her running across open fields, hiding in a cluttered attic in various states of dishabille—the cause for the librarian’s distaste, I presumed. But most of the images were bucolic and unpeopled. In one, a pond, smooth as a serving platter, with a single magpie frozen in flight through the evening’s brume above it. In another, a cropped close-up of a gashed tree, wounded across its trunk, the lower part that would, on me, be my pelvis. I gasped, empathetic, at the arboreal violence, and, feeling the jagged tear, drew my hand protectively across my own abdominal valley.

The last page displayed the author’s bio—Meg Moreley lives and photographs in southwestern Virginia—and a smaller image, the size of an index card, of a dirt road rending a tobacco field, leading up to a clapboard house with chipped and peeling white paint, a deteriorating front porch, one dark shutter falling from its hinges. The pull I felt toward that road, that field, that house. If I somehow could climb inside the scene, live there, I would never be anxious about the future again, I just knew it. My life would be planned; all I would have to do is drop into it.

Without thinking, I slipped out my pen knife, a talisman with a pearled handle I’d found at the flea market and kept tucked in the shaft of my leather army boot for no other reason than to have a secret, which I thought made me interesting, and sliced the plate from the thick, glossy paper, leaving a precise 3x5 void. I fed the image into my wallet and ran.

It was that photo that drove me here, to my college in Roanoke, Virginia, where Moreley herself studied years ago. It drove me down miles of back roads, searching for that house I still can’t find. And then it drove me to this bar, to this man who conjures with his presence, with his voice, everything the image of that clapboard house ever made me feel. I finger my wallet in my bag. I want him to speak again. He needs to speak again. Please, speak again.

But when Navin empties his bottle, Jules, efficient as he is, sweeps it away, asks, Another? Navin slides a few dollars out in front of him. I turn and, pretending to study something on the other side of the large bay window by the door, take in his profile. Nose, lips, chin, all there, all normal, masculine, nothing remarkable, and yet. I feel my heart beating so fast and strong I fear everyone in the place can hear it, all five of them. He lifts his head, checks the score of the game glowing on the television above him. Before curling back over his fresh bottle, he cocks my way and I see his face full-on. Lashes as long as the Blue Ridge Parkway and eyes the same dusty cerulean as the surrounding mountains.

I want to smile at him, take his hand, lead him out of the bar. I imagine us together, back in that truck, riding a pure, agrestic feeling, heading home to our clapboard house with a big brass bed inside, soot-stained lace curtains, maybe a cat, maybe an old bloodhound, a scene so commonplace no one else would dream to step inside. Here, Navin and I: safe, secluded, alone.

Instead, I knock over my glass, ice cubes scattering across the bar. Jules swats me away with a rag when I try to scoop up the mess, so I tuck a ten-dollar bill into his tip jar, grab my book and leave, embarrassed. I’m certain that in that one brief glimpse, Navin pierced through me, all the way down to my sordid thoughts, and did not like what he saw.

Not ready to go back to campus even though I have People and Plants in the morning, I pull from Grandin onto Bluemont. The cemetery up the way closes its gates at dusk, but last year while exploring I found a break in the fence, a slight lip-curl of chain-link in the back corner of the grounds beneath a large maple. I park in front of the apartment building across the street, saunter over, and slide through.

Cemeteries, especially at night, soothe me. Everything goes silent, still, and the darkness offers a unique privacy. I can sit, tarrying inside a reverie, or jog along the paths, mouthing poetry to myself. The residents don’t criticize me or demand I focus, speak up, join them. They decompose. I flourish.

My favorite tombstone is more like a stage, low and flat, with a slight stoop in front for flowers and other mementos. Raymond Merrymount, 1874-1947. No other Merrymounts. I climb atop the tomb. If we have souls that watch the earth after our bodies go, I like to believe Raymond welcomes me, appreciating the company. I pluck and braid blades of grass to leave as a token of friendship and thanks. My breath swirls into a cloud as I exhale. It’s not even Halloween but the air is crisp; I smell that doughy, flat scent of dried leaves with a hint of bonfire.

In the distance, a tree branch snaps. Another, closer. I sit up, my heart in my throat. My cell phone beeps, and I shriek. A raccoon scurries off, its striped tail disappearing into the darkness. Laughing at myself, I check my phone: a text from Mara. Where are you? Knocked on your door, checked the library. I write back, Grocery store. Want anything? Be back in 20. She texts back, Beer. Then signs off with a text heart, <3.

At Kroger, I check each man I pass to see if it’s Navin, knowing it won’t be but hoping nonetheless. I buy Mara a six-pack of his drink, Budweiser, but in cans, and myself a pack of chewable mints. The buzzing thought of him zaps at my mind like minuscule lightning bolts as I make my way back to campus. Attempting to burn off some of my frustrated energy, I park and take to the loop, a mile-long path around the perimeter of the university’s property, rewinding and replaying the night as I walk, Mara’s bag of beer banging into the back of my knee. Will I see him again? Not just in a glance across the bar, but there, next to him, listening to him speak? The space in the back of my throat liquefies with uncertainty, but here, in the place where premonition and determination meet, the answer pulses: yes, oh, yes.

After my second mile, I head toward the heart of campus. Nearing the dorms, my chest tightens. Ours is a small school, eight-hundred undergrads, all girls, suffocating. Our rooms—mine, Mara’s, and Elle’s—are on the top floor of Main, the largest building at the foot of the quad. Getting closer, I see my friends wrapped in blankets, sitting in the hunter green rockers on Main’s long veranda, smoking.

Reaching for her beer, Mara asks, You were at Kroger all evening? She pulls a can from the bag and frowns at the label.

I needed something, I say.

What’d you get? she asks. Our conversations often play out like this, games of tug-of-war.

Mara cracks the beer, foam dousing her hand and feet. Elle dodges the spray by leaping out of her rocker. Mara wipes her fingers on her blanket and then, after pouring the remaining beer into a pink Nalgene water bottle, crushes the can and lobs it into the trash bin at the end of the porch.

I step away from the puddle oozing toward me and hold up the roll of mints.

That took two hours?

I’m not winning this battle. Relenting, I say, I went out for a drink first, and shrug to show, No big deal.

You sneak, Elle says. You had a date.

Oh my god, Mara says after a long swig from her bottle. You went back to CI, didn’t you? To see if that old guy was there? That one you kept watching the other night? She laughs. You’re blushing. Busted!

Unconvinced, Elle studies me, gauging my reaction. Her scrutiny shifts to disbelief. You really did go back there. She drops her cigarette butt into the empty coffee cup on the chair next to her. He could be your dad. That’s gross, right? Turning, she seeks approval from Mara, who nods in agreement. Gross, Elle repeats. What the fuck.

I’m going to go read, I say. Enjoy the beer.

It’s three flights of steps to my room, and as I climb, my phone beeps. Mara. Don’t be mad, darlin’. Only she can slip her Southern belle accent into texts messages. You know I <3 you and want to see you happy—just not with some geriatric redneck. Don’t sell yourself short.

I can’t blame them for blowing things out of proportion. Haven’t I already imagined inserting myself into Navin’s life? All from the slope of a back, long eyelashes, two words, that voice. When he looked at me, he didn’t smile or acknowledge me at all. What did I expect—for him to slam me on the bar and take me right there with Jules watching? What the fuck, indeed. Mara and Elle, though—they don’t know Navin. They don’t know what he’s like or how old he is or what he does. Granted, neither do I, but is it selling yourself short to go after what you want, regardless of the whats or whys? Does Mara ever have to justify Cal, her on-again, off-again, to anyone?

And I don’t even want Navin. I’m intrigued. Curious. That’s all.

If I can get myself to believe this, I’ll be fine.

#

In class in the morning, I can’t focus. It’s only Tuesday, and Thursdays are my Fridays. College, like life, is a waiting game. Waiting for the weekend, for winter break, for spring break, for graduation. After that, more waiting. For an answer to the question of what you want to do with your life. For a paycheck, for a week of vacation every three years, for retirement, for death.

We’re reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Professor Weber, during some diatribe against Monsanto, denounces genetically modified organisms and the agro-industrial complex. I pull out my writing packet for tomorrow’s workshop, three short stories and two poems, but the words swirl across the page.

I won’t go back to CI tonight. I won’t sit there and wait for him. I will forget about him. Imperative—and impossible. I can still smell him, autumn, ozone, and dirt. He is what I’ve spent late nights tearing through the mountains in my car with the windows rolled down trying to find. Now I’ve succeeded, I’ve found it, but I don’t know how to keep it.

Between classes, I take to the loop, walking miles, going nowhere. The fields behind the stables hold onto the last threads of green and the sky coughs blue, lighter now, less oppressive, less bruising. The sun slices in, gilded. Days like this were so rare in chilly, grey Pennsylvania but here, it’s as though Virginia celebrates the fall. It says, Come on in; get comfortable, have some spiced cake.

Breaking from the road, I run toward the trees and end at the lip of Carvin Creek hemming the far edge of campus. The sun shining on the water turns it into a mirror, reflecting the trees back at themselves. I wonder if Meg Moreley ever stood here, camera in hand. I don’t hear the cars or the trucks, the girls in sweatshirts and pajama pants chattering as they make their way to class, so it’s easy to pretend I’m somewhere else, in some sylvan Shangri-La. I hear the lingering birds, the roiling water, the wind, my heartbeat. I’m a pioneer in the wilderness beyond the frontier. I sit on a culvert’s cement forehead, letting my feet hang down into its mouth, and listen, late for class by now. Critical Theory, Longinus’s On the Sublime. I’ll tell Professor Cassady I was out experiencing the sublime on my own if she asks about my absence, though I’m confident she won’t. In a class of eight people, no one will notice I’m not there.

Chapter 2

To try to press pause on the Bud bottle loop running through my mind—and to get Mara and Elle off my back about Navin, my stalkee, as they’ve taken to calling him—I agree to one more blind date. Elle’s shaggy blonde, Josh, has a friend who’s all creative and likes to read and shit and for that, Elle deems him perfect for me.

I beg her to set it up as a double date, but she refuses. Got to leave the nest sometime, little one. Ryan’ll be here at seven on Saturday. She adds, with a snicker, He’s our age, so younger than you like, but don’t hold that against him. He’s a sweetie.

An hour before Ryan is due, Mara comes to my room. Just to visit, she assures me, but I understand this is an inspection. My jeans and over-sized, holey black sweater don’t pass.

Would it hurt you to try? she asks, swinging open my closet door. Out comes a black and white polka-dot wrap dress. Here. She locates a pair of red wedges and a matching purse. Why don’t I ever see you wear this stuff?

It’s uncomfortable.

She ignores me. You own mascara, right?

When I tell her I don’t, that it makes me look like I’m wearing false eyelashes, she tells me that’s the point. She leaves and returns with a vintage teal train case, pops it open and snaps her fingers at me. Ren, dress on, now.

I comply, then sit at my desk while she smears unknown creams and powders on my face. When she steps back to admire her work, she says, Jesus. I want to fuck you. Screw your date, stay here with me.

Elle rushes in waving her phone. Josh just texted. Ryan’s on his way. She stops in front of me. Wow, Ren. You’re—a girl. Or a woman. You know what I mean. Hot.

I know, right? Mara glows, a proud mother. We never doubted you were pretty, she assures me, but you clean up good, kid.

Can we stop talking about my appearance?

Confidence won’t kill you, Mara advises. Enjoy being pretty.

Ryan’ll enjoy it, Elle says, reaching over to smooth down one of my stray hairs.

Changing tactics, I admit I’m nervous.

You’ve been on dates before, Elle says.

When I tell her this one feels different, she asks how, but I can’t tell them that this is my only chance to get Navin out of my head. I’m banking on some guy I’ve never met to drive out Navin’s ghost, the memory of his voice. I guess I’m just excited about it, is the lie I offer.

You didn’t look all that excited in the getup you had on earlier, Mara says. You looked like you wanted to fuck this up like all the other dates we’ve gotten for you.

She’s right. Before even saying hello, I’ve put this guy in an impossible position: make me forget a man I don’t want to forget. I want Ryan to fail. I want to fail him.

It’s one date. Have fun. That’s all you need to do, Elle says. It’s okay if you don’t like him, but at least give it a shot.

Mara peers out the window. A guy’s walking up. That’s him, right? she asks Elle, then whispers, He’s so cute.

I grab my coat and head toward the stairs.

Knock him dead, Elle says. I flip her off as I descend to the front door.

Ryan? I ask, stepping out onto the porch.

Ren? Hi. He moves in for a hug as I hold out my hand, my fingers poking into his ribs. He hops back.

Mortified, I apologize. I guess I should come clean: I’m really awkward.

Me too, Ryan says. We can start a club. Make t-shirts.

Awkward t-shirts.

Three sizes too big, ripped, with pit-stains, he says with a grin. Want to start over? A mulligan? He holds out his hand and we shake. I’m parked behind that building over there. As I follow him, I look back and see Mara and Elle watching from my window. Mara smiles and waves. Elle mouths, Good Luck.

Ryan opens the door for me. I slide in and as he climbs behind the wheel he says, "I know the way these things are supposed to work is we go to a movie and spend the entire time wondering, Should I hold her hand? Is he going to try to hold my hand? And then afterward we go out for a drink and have only the movie to talk about but since neither of us were paying attention there’s a lot of awkward silence, which we’d both be good at—and by good, I mean we’d be excruciating—and then at the end we go through the whole, Should I kiss her? Is he going to kiss me? spiel, and as we’ve seen, if I did try to kiss you, I’d get disemboweled, so let’s not do that, okay? Plus, I had Josh ask Elle about you and I think I’ve come up with something you might like more. I hope it’s not too corny."

What is it?

Don’t you like surprises?

Not really. Previous experience tells me this is where our path for the evening will go one of two ways: he writes me off as a bitch, stops playing the kind, solicitous guy and aims to make things as uncomfortable as possible, or he, sensing my disinterest, retreats into himself and stares at me, silent and intimidated.

Just this once? For me? The look he shoots me, part playful puppy, part young Paul Auster, steely and wise, forges a third path. I might enjoy myself tonight. Mara was right: he is cute.

I heave an exaggerated sigh. Just this once. But that’s it. No more.

Deal.

We cut off campus, onto the highway, beyond a dozen exits, all the while talking and it’s not awkward, it’s easy. He watches the road; I watch him, his hands steady on the steering wheel. The moon glows above us, its light dousing his knuckles a faint blue. His eyes are dark. His hair too, and curly. With the faint brush of beard, he resembles a brooding child trying to pass as older, but it works for him. Soon farmland surrounds us. I crack the window, smell Navin’s scent, and rush to roll the window back up.

Too hot? Ryan asks, reaching for the dash. I can adjust the heat.

Everything’s fine, I assure him. It’s more a reminder to myself.

We pull up to a farm littered with scarecrows and pumpkins, sugar-high children flocking en masse. In the distance, hay rolls create a fence between the now-stripped fields where squash, zucchini, pumpkins, and beans grew and the woods of eastern white pine. Between the fields and the dirt parking lot are smaller sectioned-off stations, mostly for the younger visitors: a face-painting booth, rubber duck races, a train made from rain barrels painted the black and white of Holstein cows.

A pumpkin patch?

He reads the hand-painted sign hanging crooked on a fence post as we amble up the dirt walkway. "A