Page 1 of Lightning in a Mason Jar

Prologue

1971

Changing my identity and leaving behind everything familiar should have been difficult. Traumatic, even. Except it wasn’t. Because from birth, we women aren’t tethered to our names. Marriage may turn a Jane Smith into Jane Brown or Jane Jones. Or into Jane Smith Brown Jones through widowhood or divorce, followed by remarriage.

Even the connection to a first name is tenuous when spoken. “Introducing Mrs. John Smith” would be followed with a whisper like a distorted echo ...

“Her husband’s adoctor.”

“Her baby d-i-e-d.”

“She’s barren.”

As if a woman’s entire worth, her sum total sense of self, were tied into her ring finger and uterus. A Mrs. or a mom.

Could those hushed voices be that oblivious to the world exploding with marches and rallies, bra burnings and sit-ins? I wasn’t. I cheered those women on from my living room, images flickering across my new color television set, the wooden cabinet kind that dominated its own corner where once a tiny black and white had rested on an antique tea cart.

This was more than simply incinerating cotton and lace. It was like a broken bottle being melted and reshaped by an emerging sisterhood, a revolutionary sorority.

The world was changing, and that bigger, brighter screen gave me an expanded peek. Decorated with family portraits and silk flowers on top, the Magnavox invited me on a nightly news date to watchthem. I was proud ofthemand alltheywere battling to achieve. I was also thankful for my safe life that protectedmefrom beingthem. What a comfortable place to exist, in that cottony swaddle of complacency.

So yes, I expected the changes that began when my father gave away the bride. Givingmeaway to Phillip, as if I were a possession passed over to a neighbor like a handsaw or a charcoal grill—or the tiny black-and-white television—he no longer needed but still thought of fondly. Although if I’d been a brighter color TV, I might have been wanted. Still objectified, but not discarded.

However, I accepted, and at that time embraced, my new identity as Phillip’s wife, even if it meant losing a part of myself. No one forced me to walk down the aisle in my mother’s white lace gown that itched, with my hair piled on my head, anchored by Aqua Net that stung my eyes and bobby pins that scarred my scalp. Nobody insisted I put aside completing college to start a family right away. I made my own choices. At least I thought I did.

Then I began doubting even my tiniest of decisions. I forgot to buy slaw for supper, even though Phillip insisted he’d written it on the list I’d anchored to the refrigerator with a banana-shaped magnet—a list I now couldn’t locate. But no need to be upset or melodramatic. Didn’t I know how much he treasured me?

I thought I’d put the credit card in my wallet as always, except it was in the medicine cabinet. No wonder a husband had to sign the application for a Master Charge card. Perhaps he should keep it from now on. If I wanted extra cash, I only had to ask him and he would increase my household allowance. Money that came from my trust fund.

Maybe I just needed rest. I should cancel the cruise to Mexico with his parents. Send our regrets for my class reunion. Leave behind sad reminders of my dead parents and relocate to the country for fresh air, where we could build my dream studio for glassblowing. Didn’t I want to get back to my art? Eventually. Once I was myself again.

Except time went by, feeling more and more strange. And as I lost my bearings, my husband retreated from me in ways that unnerved me. Who was he to become the expert on my mental health? And why did I feel better the days when he traveled for work? The weeks when he left for conferences?

By increments my world grew smaller and smaller, until that day, the worst day, whenIbecame one ofthem. My cottony swaddle of complacency split open to reveal a light so blinding it sliced through me like the electroshock therapy that followed. Therapy that Phillip had been quick to suggest. Quick to approve.

In the silence that followed came a soul-deep realization. Phillip intended to keep me institutionalized forever and take what was mine for himself. Who knew when he’d made that decision? Surely not from the start. After the miscarriages? The stillbirth? Or simply because he could. Now that my parents were gone, who would stop him?

Except he underestimated me. Or overestimated himself. He could steal the money, my name, even a piece of my sanity. But he couldn’t stealme. Which meant I had the most important choice of my life, the first I made completely on my own.

I had to run.

The details of how I managed to escape the hospital aren’t important yet. Those secrets are carefully guarded, doled out in increments to only the most trusted in what has become my network—my life’s work, you could say. To protect those with the greatest need.

All you have to know for now? I embraced the reality of my own making, being one ofthem. Helping the most vulnerable ofthemwhen they need to run as well.

Ask me who I am or where I’m from? Eloise Carlisle Curtis is a faint specter, ostracized to the dim recesses of my mind. I rarely think of my life in Mobile, Alabama, anymore, of my marriage, of my art. Of my daughter. In fact, it’s better that way since a whisper of that time threatens my present, even my hard-won sanity.

Today? My name is Winnie Ballard. I’m from Bent Oak, South Carolina, where I work in the paper mill.

But tomorrow? Well, like I said, I’m not tethered to something so inconsequential as a name.

Chapter One

2025

Without Aunt Winnie, nothing anchored Bailey Rae Rigby to backwoods Bent Oak, South Carolina, anymore.

Only a month left until she could hitch her vintage Airstream behind her F-250 and hightail it out of this town to Myrtle Beach, where she would fulfill the dream of the woman who’d raised her. She just had to survive the next four Saturdays at the Bent Oak Farmers’ Market settling Aunt Winnie’s affairs in an estate sale—flea-market style.

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