We Speak in Storms Read online

  Like everyone in Mercer, Joshua had thought about whether their house would stand a chance in a tornado. Thin walls, leaky windows, doors you could probably punch a hole through. It would be a shredded pile of plastic siding when it was all finished. He didn’t want to die that way, an invisible virgin beside a sister obsessed with YouTube makeup tutorials and near a man who was afraid of a fifteen-year-old’s cooties. If Joshua was going to die, he wanted to be remembered like the Storm Spirits.

  Everyone in town traced their history to the night at the drive-in over fifty years ago, as though it had been some great war. My grandfather’s sister, Emily; my grandmother’s next-door neighbor, Kelsey; the paperboy, Terry. Whole families were still branded lucky or cursed, depending on how many people they’d lost. Joshua’s family had been lucky, though his own life hadn’t been any indicator. Maybe it was time for that to change. Maybe pretending to be brave was the first step toward truly being brave.

  Joshua stood up.

  “Where are you going?” his mother asked sharply.

  “I want to see it.”

  “Absolutely not. Sit down, Joshua.”

  “Relax. It’s probably just a false alarm,” he said.

  “Idiot, it’s the seventh!” Ruthie sounded desperate, losing the usual chill she wore like a cloak. Lawrence, characteristically, said nothing.

  Joshua ignored them all and took the stairs two at a time, afraid that the too-thin bravery would leak out of him if he slowed. When he neared the top of the staircase, his mother yelled his name. If they lived through this, Joshua would be grounded, but being grounded wasn’t terrible when you didn’t have any friends.

  He tried the living room first. All he could see were rows of their subdivision’s identical houses, the sky a chalkboard green behind them. The kitchen windows at the back of the house faced town, with only a few church spires to obstruct his view of the farmland beyond. And there, in the distance, like a wasp’s nest, hung a tornado. It moved like a swarm too, somehow erratic and purposeful all at once.

  Joshua stepped backward, away from the window. He wished he hadn’t abandoned the gentle pressure of his sister’s shoulder, the security of the cold concrete, his mother. Despite his body, its unruliness and mass, he really was small. Unbearably so. Like a speck. Like a louse. And no amount of empty bravery was going to change that. He spun around and quickly jogged back downstairs.

  Callie Keller gripped the wheel tightly as she drove, her windshield wipers revealing the countryside in blurry swatches: the rain-slick cornstalks arching and bowing in the wind, the runoff pooling, black, in the ditches, the turbines blinking red in the fields beside them. In flashes of lightning, her father’s face lit white, and she was struck by how old he seemed. He’d always been the stereotypical beauty of the family: tall, broad-shouldered, with pronounced Swedish cheekbones, blue eyes, and blond hair. But her mom’s cancer was aging him—and not just with a few more silver strands or laugh lines. He looked as if he were trying to keep his face as frozen as possible, as if it might crack and float away if he didn’t lock his jaw tightly enough.

  Earlier that night, Callie had stood in front of the mirror after her shower, wondering if she’d changed since her mother’s terminal diagnosis less than a year before. Ever since middle school, Callie would scrutinize her appearance, wishing she didn’t share her mother’s boyishness: the limp brown hair, narrow nose, nearly flat chest, wide shoulders, and too-muscular legs. But lately she felt removed, like she could study her body without wanting it to be anything else. It was just a case she was zipped inside, and it was her strategy, since cancer, to make sure the case was as empty as possible. To eat nothing. To feel nothing. To believe in nothing. It was the only way she could survive as her mother slipped further from the world.

  Her father craned his neck to see the sky through the passenger window. “We should head home. The weathermen were right.” Her father would only admit this kind of thing begrudgingly. Unlike most of Mercer, he didn’t believe in weathermen, God, or ghosts. He was a transplant, only moving to town to marry Callie’s mother.

  “Aren’t I supposed to practice driving in all weather conditions?” Callie asked, her palms itching with the desire to get as far away as possible. “You don’t want me to drive in a storm alone for the first time, do you?”

  He gave her a small smile. Did he want to get out of that house as badly as she did?

  Before her mother was dying of cancer, that smile would have turned into a Dad joke with him calling her full of Callie-cat piss and vinegar. He’d once been King of the Puns, laughing with his hand on his belly like some slimmed-down Santa. Before her mother was dying of cancer, Callie would have turned back—back to homework and microwave popcorn at the kitchen table while her parents blared a TV movie. But this was after, so Callie kept driving farther and farther, rain pounding on the roof.

  There were no streetlights in the country, and even with her brights, it was darker than normal, everything blurred by sheets of rain. Lightning flashed above them, cracking the sky with silver and purple. In the momentary flash, their surroundings were lit, bright and stark, like a photograph negative. Callie saw a white car parked on the opposite shoulder of the road. It was a classic, like something you’d see in Mercer’s homecoming parade: chrome bumpers, hubcaps, fins, and tiny round headlights that reminded her of cartoon eyes. A pale face looked out the wide windshield at them.

  “Do you think they need help?” Callie asked as they drove past. The sky closed back up, and she couldn’t see the face anymore.

  “Who?” said her father.

  “The person in that car.”

  Her father looked over his shoulder. “I don’t know, but they’re probably waiting it out like we should be. Pull off the road. Flashers on.”

  Callie eased onto the gravel shoulder and put the car in park. She glanced in her rearview mirror. Through the rain, she couldn’t see the other car’s taillights. She and her father sat for a moment, listening to the rain beat against the hood.

  “I should have made you turn back,” Callie’s father said.

  Callie looked at her hands, limp now in her lap. “I should have listened the first time. I’m sorry.” Since the diagnosis, she usually took the path of least resistance with her parents: admitting wrong. It meant fewer talks at her mother’s bedside, fewer moments trying not to stare at the green silk scarf tied around her mother’s skull, the sunken cheeks, the blank ridge where her eyebrows had been, her always-watering brown eyes.

  “I need to know you’ll listen to me,” he said quietly. “If—when—”

  “Dad. Please don’t. I said I’m sorry.” She couldn’t let him finish; she was nauseated at all that when implied. This nausea was one of the reasons she’d stopped eating. It wasn’t sympathy nausea per se; it had more to do with the way her mom smelled now, like the cancer had replaced something essential—something Callie used to be able to detect beneath the deodorant and shampoo. Indescribable, because it wasn’t from a field or pantry. The old Callie—her dad’s curious Callie-cat—would have found a word for it if she’d known there’d be a time when her mother wouldn’t smell like herself anymore. Now the Callie who knew that her mother’s scent was gone for good just tried to think nothing nothing nothing whenever she leaned in close.

  “In the past, I got to be the good cop all the time. And now”—Callie’s father shook his head—“I can’t be.”

  Callie cracked a window for air, and a few droplets hit her forehead. If she stopped eating entirely, stopped feeling entirely, she could fit through a crack that small: escape.

  “Okay,” she said, hoping it would be enough for him, that she’d be allowed out of this conversation.

  They sat for a moment in silence. The rain stopped, and the sky was the color of seaweed. The air was different now, charged. Then, a long yowl, low to high and low to high again.

  The hair
s on the back of Callie’s neck prickled. After God had failed to protect her mother, Callie had vowed not to place her faith in anything she couldn’t see. Still, she couldn’t help thinking of the lore her mother and the rest of the town subscribed to—that a whole family could be cursed: Callie’s grandmother’s twin sister had died in the storm of 1961, her mother was dying of cancer, and now she and her father were trapped in a car during a tornado.

  Then it hit her. “Isn’t it the seventh today?”

  Callie’s dad stared straight ahead. “I guess I just want whatever time your mother has left to be—”

  “Dad, the siren. Shouldn’t we go?” she interrupted.

  Corn, lit by Callie’s headlights, began to whip—not just bending in one direction, but Hula-Hooping, tassels flashing. Then a sound she recognized: a waterfall. They’d gone on a family vacation to Niagara last summer. Callie didn’t understand what the sound was doing here, but her dad’s face awoke. Eyes widening and teeth exposed like he was about to whistle through them. He craned his neck again, trying to see above the corn. Callie looked too but didn’t see anything.

  “Tornado,” he said. “Ditch. Now!”

  Callie swung open the door and flung herself into the ditch beside the road. She flattened herself on her stomach, water soaking through her shirt. Her dad ran around and crouched over her, his chest pressing her head into the ditch weeds.

  The roar grew louder, and Callie felt something wet plaster the back of her thigh. A sharp object glanced against her arm. She expected the shriek of metal as the car was ripped apart. It would be her fault. She was the one who’d kept driving during a storm. But she didn’t feel afraid, not for the car or for her life. She was simply aware of things in a way she hadn’t been before: her father’s collarbone pressing into her back, the wet cotton clinging to her stomach, the pull of hair around her ears. The deafening sound of rushing water, the memory of a summer afternoon posing beside her mother while her dad held his phone up. They hadn’t been sure if he was taking a photo or video, so her mother kept saying: Now? What about now? Tell us when, David. Can you see the falls? Can you hear us over them? The airline had lost one of her mom’s bags and she was wearing Callie’s clothing. A Mercer High T-shirt, soccer shorts, visor. Callie wore a different T-shirt and knock-off Ray-Bans instead of a hat. Still, she knew that she and her mother must look like twins, leaning into each other and smiling big.

  But that moment, like so many others, was long gone, Callie realized. What happened above them now didn’t matter. Her own death didn’t scare her. It was simply a matter of closing her eyes and waiting.

  THOSE OF US AT THE DRIVE-IN

  Those of us at the drive-in that night, decades ago, grew up watching The Wizard of Oz. The movie tornado is a muted swirl of farmhouses, trees, livestock, neighbors, and the mean Miss Gulch on her bicycle. The thing is, when we were inside the funnel, we were blind. We became what we felt: the stinging shards of glass against skin, skulls knocking against steering wheels, limbs flapping wildly, hearts lodged in throats, their beats broadcasting the end: This is it, this is it, this is it.

  We ache to tell those who came after us: This—your pain—isn’t.

  The sound of the tornado subsided to a distant hiss. A few drops of rain hit the back of Callie’s neck. How long had they been in the ditch? In the wake of adrenaline, her body felt famished, frail, and cold. But her mind was empty, vacuumed deliciously clean. There was no funnel in sight. Only thick gray clouds swirling in the dark sky.

  Her dad sat up, releasing the pressure on her head and back. “You okay?”

  She nodded and scraped damp grass blades off her cheeks. He was breathing hard, like they’d been running together—something they used to do before her mom got sick, racing along the Mercer canal to the tree with the heart-shaped knot. She blinked away the memory, already yearning for that vacuumed-empty feeling she’d had just seconds before.

  Callie peeled a piece of wet cardboard off her jeans and tried to stand, but her legs buckled, so she knelt instead, inhaling, willing steadiness into her muscles. Shakily, her father lifted her by the elbow. Callie took inventory of her injuries: there was a cramp in her knuckles from her balled fist, the keys biting the fleshy part of her palm, a hot trickle of blood on her arm. But she was intact. Whole.

  Her father circled their car, inspecting it for damage. She looked for the other car she’d seen in the flash of lightning, but the pavement stretched behind them, empty and dark. Had the person driven away?

  “That was close,” her father said softly, returning to the ditch to take the keys from her. She wondered if he was thinking of her mother, how she’d die alone if they were both gone. A thought snaked into Callie: It would be easier that way. She held the thought, rolling it around with her tongue, clacking it against her teeth, before pushing it out of her head.

  As he started the car and pulled a U-turn, they were silent. Her father’s face was flushed and his hands were still shaking. Did death scare him? Had he been afraid of how much he wanted to live?

  Seconds later he braked hard, pulling onto the shoulder.

  “Look.” He pointed to the edge of a soybean field, just inside the cone of their headlights. A great wide swatch had been ripped up less than a hundred yards from where they’d crouched in the ditch, the beans churned and tossed at the base of a turbine. “I think it touched ground here.”

  The hair on Callie’s arms stood up, a response as automatic as her belief had been before the diagnosis. The belief that in Mercer, there were ghosts, that some houses—like her own—were haunted. That there was a God. Until there wasn’t.

  “Dad, it’s the seventh,” she said again.

  At first he didn’t appear to have heard, but then he nodded. “A coincidence.”

  “A coincidence,” she repeated, mimicking his confidence, but her arms still prickled.

  A few fields over from where they were parked, there’d once been cropped grass, a whitewashed wall, outhouses, and a snack shack. Now there was a cornfield with a shrine of plastic crosses and fake flowers. On Halloween, kids snuck between the rows, listening for the Storm Spirits to whisper like the moviegoers they once were. Callie had never heard them herself, but one of her cross-country friends, Arlene, had insisted on bringing a Ouija board to the field the year before—back when Callie still believed. Not ten minutes in, Callie had felt the planchette move under her fingers, spelling F-I-N-D-A-R-E-P-A-R-E-N-T-S. Callie had seen Arlene’s schoolwork often enough to know that she’d been the one moving the piece across the board. The Storm Spirits, Callie had thought at the time, were probably too offended by the use of a Ouija board to bother with eager teenagers, especially those who didn’t know the difference between our and are.

  Callie’s father didn’t believe, but her mother’s belief was practically a birthright. Their house, which her mother had dreamt about living in since she was a child, was one of the twelve original Victorians that lined the town square and the subject of plenty of its own ghost stories. It was one of the oldest houses in Mercer and had once been an inn. Now the phantom visitors were said to knock about, climbing stairs, slamming doors, and dropping what sounded like luggage in the empty bedrooms. Callie’s father had always explained the noises as squirrel nests, drafts of air, warped doorframes, and settling foundations, but Callie had preferred her mother’s explanation, had loved the way the sounds made her feel like there was an electric wire inside her stomach. She’d chase the sounds, trying to find the ghosts so that she could ask them why they’d come back.

  Now the wake of the first tornado to touch down since 1961 stretched away from their car, away from Callie’s house, away from her sick mother—a mysterious path beckoning.

  “Let’s see how far it went,” she said.

  “We should get back. Your mom is probably worried.”

  “She’s probably asleep, Dad.”

  His face was
still frozen, and she wanted it to shatter into a grin, for his mouth to form the words Okay, Callie-cat Holmes, but he remained silent and unmoving.

  Callie opened the glove box and pulled out the flashlight her father kept there for emergencies. She swung open the passenger door. The air smelled like sulfur and freshly mown grass, and was cooler now than it had been just minutes before. Callie wished she were wearing more than a damp long-sleeve T-shirt and jeans. Behind her, the headlights flicked off and the door slammed. With her dad following, Callie started down the path, her flashlight beam bobbing, the tendrils of the shredded plants wrapping around her ankles.

  Something glinted and Callie stopped, aiming her flashlight at the base of the turbine. The light reflected off a splintered mirror. It was the white car she’d seen earlier on the road. Crushed. The windshield was shattered, the car’s hood was accordion-folded, the trunk had been ripped open and twisted, and the paint had cracked like an eggshell. Callie shone the light inside. The seats were white leather, wet but pristine, like they hadn’t been touched. There were no signs of people. No mud on the floor mats. No balled-up Kleenexes or ice scrapers or pairs of tennis shoes. Callie tried to picture the person she’d seen earlier in the lightning flash, but her glimpse had been so quick. Had that person found a ditch too? Or were they lying hurt somewhere?

  “Callie, get out from under there.” Her father pointed at the turbine above. One of its blades was dangling at its side like a broken limb. “That thing could fall at any minute.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed.

  Ignoring him, Callie walked around the car. There was a brown Route 66 sticker shaped like the road sign on the back bumper. She shined her flashlight on the plants at her feet. Footprints led from the car to the neighboring cornfield, like maybe the person had been trying to escape or was confused and stumbling. She tried to follow them with her flashlight, but they disappeared in the darkness between the rows of corn. Was the pale-faced person watching her from the shadows? Were they hiding or did they need help?