Taken by Storm by Angela Morrison Page B

have Leesie’s hand—don’t want to let it go.
     
    Her hand in mine writhes. My eyes stray down. My fingernails are digging dints into the soft flesh on the back of her hand. A tear makes a wet path down her cheek. i let go.
     
    “Look what i did to you.” i shift so a space opens between us.
     
    “It’s nothing.” She buries her bleeding hand in my sweatshirt’s pocket. “I’ll be back.” She slips away—just to the bathroom, though. She can’t leave. i still have her clothes, drying.
     
    i stretch out on the couch, listening to the water run in the bathroom sink, sorry that i hurt her.
     
    She comes back and leans against the doorway. Her eyes travel over the pictures on the desk. “I should go.”
     
    “Not yet.” Please, no. She comes to me. i need to ask her before she evaporates. “Was it real?”
     
    She looks down at her hand.
     
    “i know that’s real. i’m sorry.” Four red fingernail digs—i can see them from across the room. It’s like i branded her. “i’m a freak these days.”
     
    She blows on the cuts, meets my eyes again. “It’s nothing.”
     
    “That ‘she comes to me’ stuff in your poem. Was it real?”
     
    Her eyebrows draw together. “You want to talk poetry?”
     
    “Did you make it up?”
     
    “No.”
     
    My palms get sweaty, and my fingers tingle. My slow, free-diver heart revs. “You saw your grandmother?” i need so bad to believe what she’s going to say. Maybe she’s a medium. Are Mormons into that? Fine by me. Pull out the crystal ball. Turn off the lights. If she can find me something other than two dead bodies in a morgue in Florida, i want to know.
     
    Leesie breaks eye contact, stares down at Gram’s flowered rug. “It’s not like she zapped into my room and flew around.” Her voice is quiet. Calm but strong. “The whole thing happened in my head.”
     
    i roll on my back, stare at the ceiling, disappointed. “Like a dream.”
     
    “No. Not a dream. A few weeks after Grandma’s funeral, my mom and I spent the evening crying together. I went to bed, said my prayers, and tried to sleep.”
     
    “You pray?” i sit up. She crosses the room, takes her old place on the couch next to me. i turn toward her.
     
    She leans forward. Her hair hangs like a veil between us. “I think this was kind of a vision.”
     
    “Okay. A vision.” Is that what happened to me at the lake? A vision? And in the pool tonight? What was that?
     
    Leesie nods. “My mind raced. I couldn’t sleep, and then my grandmother was there, inside my head, pulsing with light.”
     
    She shifts her hair so it falls down her back, almost dry. i touch it—just the ends with the back of my hand. She doesn’t protest.
     
    “You have amazing hair.” i take a handful, let it glide through my fingers. She closes her eyes, tilts her head back. i take another handful.
     
    She opens her eyes and stares into mine, doesn’t blush or look away like she usually does. “Grandma wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. So changed from the body we laid in her coffin. Not old. Not young. So beautiful I couldn’t breathe.”
     
    Leesie’s hair cascades through my hands again and again, the scent of it, the rhythm, hypnotizing me.
     
    She comes to me.
     
    She comes to me.
     
    She comes to me.
     
    Awed joy rustles in her voice. “Happiness flowed out of her, filled me up. Tangible—like you could pour it from a pitcher.” She oozes with the power of what she tells me, what happened to her.
     
    i drop her hair, break eye contact. “Couldn’t you have just imagined it?”
     
    “Overcome. That describes what I was like when she left.” Leesie doesn’t continue until i face her again. Her eyes are tender now, reach down to my soul. “I lay in bed, holding my pillow, totally embraced.” She brings her hand to my face, pushes a stray lock from my eyes. “In the morning, putting the whole thing into words was impossible, like trying to capture a beam of