“I know.”
“No, I mean, you shouldn’t be alone in this place, in this city. I never should have left.”
My mother came out of the kitchen. But she didn’t go to my dad. She went to the sliding glass door and stared at the woods. “I know,” she said. “I know what you meant.”
* * *
I found my mom standing at the glass door, still in her club shirt from work. She hadn’t moved. The TV was on but the sound was off. A weatherman was pointing at various red blobs moving across the squares and rectangles that represented our corner of the state.
“This is bad,” my mother said. “This is real bad.” A few fat drops hit the glass. I put my arms around her and rested my head on her side. “I don’t know whose fault this is,” she said. “Whose fault is this?”
I knew I wasn’t supposed to say anything, so I just squeezed my mother tighter. Her shirt smelled like sweat and club cleaner. The sky flashed and there was a quick pop, like a bulb had gone out. Little time between light and sound. My mother pushed me away from the glass. “The storm is close,” she said. “We better watch the weather.”
We sat on the couch and my mother put her arm around me. The weatherman zoomed in on our square. He pointed to the solid red mass southwest of us. He fast-forwarded the image behind him, showing us what our county would look like in a matter of minutes. What he showed was that our county wasn’t there. In its place was the red mass. The weatherman was doing his best to warn everyone. His gestures grew wilder, his eyes wider. But my mother and I couldn’t make ourselves care. We sat on the couch and knew whatever was happening out there, whatever was coming our way, was going to happen, and that nothing we could do would make it stop. All we could do was wait.
* * *
I woke up because someone was shaking me. I opened my eyes but it was as if I kept them closed. All the lights were out. The city’s siren blared.
“Come on, we have to go,” my mother was saying. I was still on the couch. She struck a match and lit a candle. “This isn’t a test.”
She got me on my feet and led me to the door. The siren was louder out in the hallway, bouncing off our building’s empty halls, the empty bedrooms. I couldn’t see anything except my mother’s worried face, yellow in the candle’s glow.
The laundry room was humid and reeked of bleach. We were the only two down here. My mother pointed to a spot by a dryer. She didn’t have to tell me what to do next. We had practiced this drill many times in school. An alarm would sound and the teacher would jump at her desk, drop her chalk, and lead us away from the classroom windows and into the hall. We would line up against the wall and they would tell us to get down on our knees. Ball up. Put your face between your legs and cover your head. They called it the fetal position, but none of us knew what that meant, unless we had an older brother who was smart and would tell us if we asked nicely. Still, we did what the teachers said. We huddled until our knees hurt from the tile, until we grew tired of tasting our breath. When the drill was over and we were all back in the classroom, rubbing our necks and complaining, the teacher would say she was sorry. Some tornadoes like to take their time. But it’s for your own good. In this part of the country, a drill like this can save your life.
“Stay down until I tell you,” my mother said. I peeked out of my position and saw the black shape of my mother, leaning on a washer, watching the storm light up the stairwell wall. The siren was fainter down here, but we could hear the dark sky grumble, low and without pause. I tucked my head and covered my ears to shut out all the noise. I imagined the red mass passing our complex, and let myself believe the storm was over, that if there was a tornado, it had somehow skipped the Frontiers. But when I uncovered my ears the wind still howled, louder than I had ever heard it before. The walls shook and creaked, like a large hand was slowly wrenching out each nail. I looked for my mother again. She blew out the candle, got down, and balled herself up next to me. She started saying things, words I couldn’t quite make out. I scooted closer so I could hear her. I put my head next to hers. Please, she said. Please. She wasn’t talking to me. She was praying.
Something shattered. I heard the spray of broken glass. It was the stairwell window, finally giving in to the wind. The outside grew even louder, the low grumble now a relentless roar. In class, the day of each drill, we asked our teachers what it was like. What’s it really like to be in a tornado? And each teacher had her own tale, her own set of memories. A green sky. A cloud like an infinite wall. But they all had one thing in common. When they described the sound of the tornado, it was always the same. It’s like a train, they would say. The shaking of the earth, the whistle of the wind. It’s like someone laid tracks right where you live. You didn’t notice because you were busy. Maybe you were at school or at work. Maybe you were picking up the kids. But when you finally did figure it out, when you heard the warning, it was too late. The train was coming through and you couldn’t get out of the way.
My mother put her arm around me and pulled me into her. She covered my entire body with hers and whispered things I couldn’t hear over the train’s violent whistle. But they were nice things. They felt good in my ear. They got me away from my imagination, from thinking about what would happen if the roof fell, if the tornado picked me up and threw me somewhere nobody would ever find. Curled over me, my mother only let me think about her. We rode the train out like that.
* * *
The tornado went away before the siren did. The whistle faded. The walls rested. I asked my mother if it was safe. “Wait,” she said. She stood, but kept her shoe on my back so I wouldn’t move. The siren eventually died, restoring our apartment’s silence. “OK,” my mother said, “you can get up.”
She helped me to my feet, and I followed her to the stairs. The lights flickered on and off, and it wasn’t long before we saw the first sign of damage. At the ground level the window above the building’s pea-green door was missing. The door itself hung by one hinge. I didn’t have my shoes on, so my mother picked me up, carried me over the broken glass, and set me safely on the hall carpet. Be careful, she said.
Upstairs, the pictures of flowers had been knocked off the wall, their frames broken. We hurried into our apartment. The electricity was out completely, so my mother lit each of us a candle. Let’s see what’s left, she said, and floated into the darkness. I took my candle and went my own way. From what I could see, everything looked the same. The bookcase stood, the encyclopedias were still in place. The sliding glass door remained closed, locked and intact. I walked into the kitchen. The square table hadn’t moved either. My cereal bowl was right where I left it.
“It missed us,” I said, out of shock, and went back into the living room, where my mother was looking up.
“No, it didn’t,” she said. She held her candle up to a gigantic crack in the ceiling, running diagonally corner to corner, spanning the entire living room. We could hear the wind breathing through the opening, invading our apartment. “This isn’t safe,” my mother said. “We have to go.”
“Where?” I said. “Rick’s?”
I didn’t know why I said that, why I had guessed Rick’s. I hadn’t even thought about it, but now that the option was out there, the choice hung in front of us, a fork in the road.
“No,” she said. “It’ll have to be your dad’s. For now.”
“Why?” I said.
She looked at the ceiling’s crack again, put her hand up to feel the cool air. “Because,” she said. “Now go to your room and grab some things. And be quick.”
* * *
When I opened the door to my room, I knew I would never live there again. There was no way. The gigantic crack from the living room tracked across our ceiling too, and the bedroom window was completely gone. In its place was a black square of night, through which a chill air seeped in. My brother’s bunk bed had been knocked off mine and lay on its side in the middle of the floor. I picked up his blanket and wrapped it around me. The outside temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees. In what was left of our ruined room, I realized I hadn’t cried yet, about anything. I hadn’t taken the time. But here, among the wreckage, I let the tears go.