“Thanks. I love you.” Merri hugged her. “I really appreciate this. I will make it up to you. Do you, um, do you know if Ben’s going?”
They wandered behind the counter to open the registers. “To the show? He didn’t mention it to me. Probably, if he has a ticket.” Andre grimaced and pressed her hands to her abdomen. “Ugh. My stomach is upset.” She’d gone to bed soon after seeing the ball lightning and wondered if she’d started to feel queasy then. She couldn’t remember. “Hey, have you ever heard of ball lightning?” She pulled out her phone to look it up. “I think I saw this last night. It was kind of like this one.” She pointed to an image of a glowing sphere. “It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. I thought I was hallucinating.”
“Weird,” Merri said. “That’s kinda cool, though.”
“Yeah.” Andre grimaced again, leaned over the counter, and put her head in her hands.
“Are you okay?”
She took a few deep breaths before answering. “Actually, no. Could you do me a favor right now?”
“Sure.”
Andre straightened. “Could you hold down the fort today? My stomach is upset, and I feel like I’m getting a fever.”
“We don’t have anything here to help you?”
“I’ll drink some ginger tea, but I think I just need to go home.”
“Okay, yeah . . . sure.”
“Thanks.” Andre broke into a chilly sweat as she walked out to her car. Her stomach churned. She sat down in the driver’s seat and took deep breaths until the feeling passed. She pulled out her phone. There was another message from Ryan:
Could not find my phone.
It was in my coat pocket.
So now it’s okay.
She smiled. They had started a couple of months ago when they were all drinking one night, and Amy was saying how nobody wrote love poems anymore. Ryan said he’d start sending Andre a poem every day, and so they’d devolved into one dumb haiku a day. She wanted to tell him about what she’d seen, but not in a text. Setting her phone down to check herself in the mirror, she noticed how pale she looked. As she was leaving out of the parking lot, a silver Mercedes pulled up and parked in front of the store. Andre watched in her rearview mirror as a moment later, the door opened, and the giantess unfurled from the driver’s side.
Ben’s car was still there when she got home. After parking, Andre sat for a moment and closed her eyes, picturing the ball lightning. She half expected to hear music when she went inside, but the house was quiet. Ben might still be sleeping. He was a night owl and usually wasn’t in bed before 2 a.m. or awake before eleven. She poured a glass of water, went up to her bedroom, and faced her window. The sky was blue and cloudless. Mount Domingo looked like an azure sandcastle in the distance. Their house was on a small hill, and she could see beyond the woods to the golden hills spotted with clumps of trees. The fact that they had a house at all in this part of the county was something of a miracle. Three millennials—two who worked menial jobs and one who was usually unemployed (Amy)—would never have been able to afford a house in Arroyo. But they’d inherited their home from their dads who’d inherited it from Ben’s paternal grandfather.
Feverish and achy, Andre laid down on her bed and fell asleep.
She woke a couple of hours later with visions of ball lightning. She’d dreamed of the crackling, silvery-gold energy hovering outside her window. She gulped water from the glass on the bedside table and went downstairs. Hammer, Ben’s mutt, came nosing after her. His eyes were watery, and his padded feet made a scratchy sound on the floor. “What about you?” She rubbed the fur along his neck. “Did you see anything strange last night?” She tried not to consider that her sickness might be connected to the light.
Andre went around the side of the house. Overgrown bougainvillea bunched around half the perimeter of the fence. She crossed the yard, opened the fence, and stood for a moment, looking down the hill to the park. The small valley of trees containing streams from the Shellara eventually rose up another, higher hill. She liked to imagine it was wild land, untamed, unexplored. Beyond those hills might be anything. There were not many vistas these days that allowed such a suggestion. Even this one was flawed. If she turned her gaze just a ways to the left, the blemish of the interstate would slice into the picture. She felt a prick of anxiety.
She walked a bit more, uncertain of what she was looking for. Ben took Hammer here all the time, but it had been at least a few weeks since she’d entered the park. The sequoia trees grew denser overhead as she moved down, and the land plateaued. There was a stream just a little farther in. When Andre got to it, she knelt on a rock and stuck her hand in the cold water. Her phone got a message. She stood, wiping her hand on her jeans, and pulled it out of her pocket. Amy: “Her car is here, but where is Andre?”
Back at the house, the fence was open, and Amy was waiting for her at the end of the yard. Andre was disconcerted to find she was panting from the short trek back up. “I need to exercise more,” she muttered, wiping her forehead with the heel of her palm. She looked at the shed to the right of her and watched a daddy longlegs traipse down the side, lose its footing, and fall to the grass.
“What’s up? Why aren’t you at work?”
“I don’t know. I was looking for . . . something.” Andre breathed deeply. “I left early. I don’t feel well.” They walked back into the house together, and Andre told her twin about the light.
“That’s bizarre. Maybe it was an alien trying to make contact or something.”
Andre smirked. “Yeah, maybe . . . what are you up to right now?” Amy only lived with Andre and Ben about a quarter of the time. She was a bit of a local nomad, and the last few weeks she’d been with Ricardo, but his apartment was already pretty crowded.
“I was bored. We didn’t have any food, and I don’t feel like grocery shopping.” They sat in the living room now. Amy frowned at her phone. “Do you know where Ben is? He’s not answering his phone or my texts, and I need to know if he’s coming with us to the Shrine tonight. If he’s not, I’m giving his ticket to Ricardo’s friend.”
“He’s not here?” Andre sat on the couch. She took one of the cushions and set it on her lap, pressed it against her stomach, and leaned over. She took a deep breath and willed her nausea away again. God, don’t let me be pregnant.
“He’s not in his room.”
Andre shivered. “That’s weird. His car is outside.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know. I feel nauseous. I think I have a little fever.” And it suddenly bothered her, acutely, that they didn’t know where Ben was. “Ben was here last night. I heard him playing right before I went to sleep.”
“Maybe he went on a walk . . . ” Amy frowned, looking at Hammer a few feet away from her lying on the threadbare blue rug in front of the kitchen window—his favorite spot. “Without Hammer?” Amy yawned. “It’s a mystery.” She reached her arms up high and cocked her head to either side, tiny popping sounds emitting from somewhere in her neck. “I’ve got to stop by Ricardo’s to drop off his ticket. You want to come with me?”