Page 1 of That Last Carolina Summer

Phoebe

MEMORY IS A disloyal friend, an unreliable narrator whose motivations are not always benign.

There are some things about that summer I remember with absolute clarity: the scalp-scorching heat; my dog, Bailey, getting hit by a car; getting my ears pierced.

Yet other events are charred around the edges, obscuring my view when I peer through the lens of hindsight and with the longing for a life that was never meant to be mine.

That summer seemed to linger longer than most, with stories of cars overheating and people dropping from heatstroke the subject of front porch and grocery store conversations.

Dogs didn’t venture past the shady boundaries made from giant magnolias and river birch trees, and the scalded leaves on our azaleas turned brown.

Mother and Daddy stopped talking about how hot it was, as if naming it would summon the devil.

I spent most of August out on the water hoping for a reprieve in the form of a good breeze, wishing some temporary, but nonetheless debilitating, disease would befall me while I dreaded the waning days of freedom until the first day of school.

Which is how I found myself squatting at the end of our dock on that scorching hot August afternoon mentally flipping through the list of possible afflictions I’d accumulated while reading the library’s collection of World Book Encyclopedia .

My preoccupation with weird diseases would explain why I wasn’t paying as much attention to the weather that afternoon as I should have been.

And why I ignored Mother’s often repeated warning to be careful what I wished for.

My bare feet on the dock were impervious to the uneven planks and loose splinters as I checked my crab pots and thought about lunch. I was always thinking about food. Mother had put me on another diet, something none of my nine-year-old peers knew anything about.

Mother was a former Miss South Carolina, with Standards and Rules that my older sister, Adeline, and I forgot to our peril. Not that Addie ever needed a reminder. But I found crabbing and fishing a better use of my time than practicing how to walk in high heels.

I’d been left to my own devices while they went for another fitting for Addie’s Peach Queen pageant dress, leaving me under the loose supervision of my aunt Sassy.

As a single woman with no kids of her own, my aunt understood better than most the importance of letting children be children.

She was also profoundly deaf, which made things easier for a growing girl who loved the wild freedom that existed outside her back door.

A blue heron perched on its long, skinny legs at the edge of the water, waiting for an unlucky snack to swim by, its cold yellow eyes pretending not to see me.

I wasn’t offended, having grown used to being ignored, and had long since discovered that I thrived under the lack of attention.

Otherwise, I’d be at Gwyn’s department store getting squeezed into a satin and tulle nightmare and being forced to suck in my tummy.

The wind blew the bird’s straggly white plume on top of its head, ruffling the feathers on its S-shaped neck.

The light blue painted bird feeder I’d made in Bible camp for Aunt Sassy swung in the strong breeze, thunking against the oak tree’s trunk.

It was only one of about a dozen feeders filled daily by my bird-loving aunt but now unusually abandoned by the chatter of finches and other songbirds.

I dropped an empty pot back into the water and looked up at a quarreling flock of royal terns with their bright orange beaks and forked tails skimming low over the water instead of their usual hunting position high in the sky.

I straightened, for the first time noticing the opaque wall-like cloud with the flat bottom hovering over us like a spaceship.

Birds were better forecasters than the weather people on television, and it was my own fault for not paying attention.

According to Aunt Sassy, birds didn’t need mathematical calculations to predict the weather, and they were always right.

Which is why I never took offense when Addie called me a birdbrain.

The first growl of thunder made me think of lunch again.

I pulled up the second crab pot, frowning at the untouched raw chicken necks I’d used as bait, aware again of the statuesque bird.

It twisted its long and slender neck to turn its head in the direction of the disappearing terns.

With a great swoop of blue-tinged feathers, the heron lifted into the air and raced inland.

I watched it disappear as I became aware of the peculiar hush around me.

Behind the rustling grass and moving water the deafening absence of bird sounds roared in my ears.

I turned at the squeak of the back screen door’s hinges. Aunt Sassy stood in the doorway, her face scrunched in worry as she glanced up at the darkening sky. She signaled with urgent hand gestures that I needed to come inside quickly.

I signed to her to let her know I’d understood, realizing she must have felt the rumble of thunder.

A jagged bolt of lightning pierced the marsh in the near distance.

I began counting the seconds— one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi —just like Aunt Sassy had taught me, walking sideways to keep an eye on the sky and the wooden boards at the same time so I wouldn’t slip off.

My toes brushed the edge of the dock where it met the prickly Spartina grass of the yard as I struggled with recently learned third-grade math. Count the number of seconds between the lightning flash and the sound of the thunder and then divide by five to get the distance to the lightning.

“One Mississippi...”

The humid air crackled and snapped like thousands of ghost crabs, lifting my hair from root to end and shooting a tingling sensation tumbling up my bones.

The sky burst open, and I started to run.

A powerful punch struck me in the middle of my back, stealing my breath and knocking me onto my stomach.

Everything went dark, and I knew that meant I must be dead.

Except I was aware of the spiky grass under my cheek, and the pelting of chilly rain on my bare arms and legs, and the briny smell of the marsh.

But the familiar pulse of blood in my ears had disappeared.

I was like a bug caught under a china cup.

A vague sense of disappointment washed over me as I figured that this must be all there was to know about death, regardless of what Reverend Bostwick told us every Sunday.

A shout, a boy’s voice, came from somewhere. Far away at first and then up close. My elbows smacked the ground as hands flipped me over like a beached dolphin. I tried to open my eyes, but they only fluttered, revealing a rotating screen of solid gray and white.

Then the boy’s voice again, shouting for someone to call 9-1-1.

Rain splattered my body but not my face, as if something was blocking me from the deluge.

I heard a sound of rustling like fabric against wet wood next to my ear, and what felt like a rock began pounding rhythmically against my chest again and again, my body ignoring all my commands to get up and run.

Cold, wet fingers pinched my nose closed then tilted my head back, my hair tugging my scalp as my ponytail rubbed against the ground. I wanted the boy to stop, to go away, because a gray-and-white world was better than this unprovoked beating.

Then a warm breath was blown into my mouth once.

Twice. My eyes flickered open, and a face appeared above me, the angry sky behind it forming an imperfect halo.

My gray-and-white vision burst into full color.

Startling green eyes the same shade as the marsh in August peered down at me, and I wondered if Reverend Bostwick had been right after all.

The boy sat back, and my eyes focused on the shark’s tooth he wore on a leather cord around his neck.

My chest expanded with an involuntary intake of air then shrank again as a piercing pain cut through my consciousness.

I gasped for breath, my skin and bones aching as the reassuring beat of my heart again rumbled within my head.

An approaching siren melded into the noise of the rain and the wind and the sound of Sassy’s bird feeders crashing into each other as my eyes followed the boy.

“She’s going to be okay,” he said to someone I couldn’t see.

His words cracked from exertion or because he was at that age when boys and their voices got stuck between childhood and manhood.

I didn’t recognize him, most likely on account of me attending a private girls’ school in Charleston and not being around boys in general.

Soft hands cupped my face. I gazed up at Aunt Sassy, at her mute agony as she knelt beside me, stroking my face again and again like I was Lazarus raised from the dead.

The boy stood as the sound of shouting men neared.

He turned toward the house, his shirtless arms and torso bronzed by the sun, his wild bleached-blond hair longer than Mother or Daddy would approve of.

Aunt Sassy bowed her head over mine to kiss my forehead, and when she lifted it again, the boy was gone.

I only learned his first name much later, but I remembered his eyes and the way the color matched the summer marsh.

That day became the line of demarcation where the before of my life intersected with the after, and his appearance in it an unwelcome reminder of all I had lost.

They say that lightning never strikes twice. Which is understandable considering the odds are one in about fifteen thousand of being struck once in a lifetime. They also say that if you survive a lightning strike, you will have no memory of it.

But, as I’ve learned from experience, both are just the lies we tell ourselves. Like the platitudes a mother might use to soothe a scared child, we cling to myths and other assurances so we can sleep at night.

That doesn’t make them the truth.