When I was done, I put my shoes on and made my way around the mess. I tried not to look at what was once the room I shared with my brother, or think anymore about what this all meant. That time is over, I told myself, and packed my bag like I was going to stay the weekend with my dad. This is a normal weekend, I thought. This is an ordinary life.
* * *
On our way to my dad’s we saw a glimpse of what the tornado had done. The damage it had left behind. Tall trees were shredded to splinters. Street signs lay broken, or spiked into front yards. The farther we drove, the more we realized how random the destruction was. How none of it made sense. The city would be pitch-black one block, perfectly lit the next. On one street every house had its roof ripped off. Then we took a left and everything seemed fine.
“What about the prisons?” I said. I imagined the tornado knocking down prison walls, letting loose the country’s worst. I imagined the Stranger waving at his former roommates, laughing and saying our time has come.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” my mother said. “Those buildings are very old. In a time like this, a prison is probably the safest place to be.”
From what we could see that night, it seemed she was right. None of the prisons had lost power. The federal penitentiary still shone on its hill, loomed over the rest of the city. Other personal landmarks weren’t as lucky. The city’s grocery store had a parked car flipped through its front. At the city park, the tornado slide was bent in half, into an L. On almost every street we drove we saw debris, broken bits of somebody’s property. Pieces of someone’s life.
“This isn’t half of it,” my mother said. “We won’t know how bad it really is until morning.”
We turned onto my dad’s street. The old people’s home was still standing, though its fence, the one my brother and I once hit home runs over, was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t until we were four duplexes away from my dad’s that we found it, coiled across the street like a big metal snake. We got out of the van and tried to move it, but we weren’t strong enough, and no one came out to help. We left the van parked on the side and walked the rest of the way.
My dad’s duplex was fine. The door was locked when I tried it, but my mother had a key. My dad had given it to her a long time ago, she said. Just in case.
We went inside and I felt like I had to show my mother around. So I showed her the kitchen, the grill out back, which miraculously hadn’t moved. I took her upstairs and showed her my dad’s room, the unmade bed where he slept. I figured she might want to go to sleep soon. I thought she was tired like me.
“I can’t sleep now,” she said. “But you can show me where you sleep. Maybe I’ll lie next to you for a bit.”
I took her downstairs, into the basement. I turned on the lamp and gestured toward my bed. A big daddy longlegs ran across the bedspread and disappeared under my pillow.
“You sleep here?” my mother said.
I found the spider and let it crawl on my hand. “It’s not that bad.”
“It’s not that good, either,” my mother said. She sat next to me on the bed. “You’re so quiet.” She brushed my bowl-shaped hair. “Don’t you ever get scared?”
I lay down and thought about the question. I thought about what I felt when my brother and I were with Chris. I tried to remember how scared I was, but I couldn’t. I thought of my brother out in the woods, alone or worse. I pictured Chris catching my brother, the two of them taking shelter in the silo. I imagined the tornado coming and taking Chris away. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t picture my brother coming back. I couldn’t imagine what he would be like.
“I don’t know,” I said.
My mother put her head on the pillow next to me. She put one arm behind her head and wrapped me in the other.
fifteen
MY MOTHER WOKE ME. It was morning, though it looked the same in the basement. We went upstairs and there was no one there. My dad’s police cruiser was not out front.
My mother made me an egg-and-cheese sandwich for breakfast. While I ate, I tried to remember pieces of the things I dreamed. But there was nothing I could hold on to. That world had fled, faded away. Now there was just the world in front of me, in which my mother sat watching me eat. Marveling at every bite like it was a small miracle. I tried not to stare back, not for too long. I stole glances at her makeup-less face, her dry, small eyes. When I was finished she put my plate in the sink and ran water over the yolk that had broken free of the egg and hardened. Something clogged the drain and I could hear the water slowly rise, forming a small pool.
“Go get your shoes,” my mother said. “We need to move the van.”
* * *
When I returned from grabbing my shoes in the basement, my mother wasn’t waiting by the door. She was in the kitchen, looking in the fridge. I asked her what she was looking for. “Nothing,” she said, and quickly slammed the door shut. She looked at me, then out the kitchen window, at me again. “Let’s go. I have to get out of here.”
Outside it was cold enough for a small jacket. The temperature had stayed down after the tornado. Dew wet the grass, and a thin fog descended on my dad’s street. Summer was ending early. Once in the van I didn’t know where my mother was taking me, but I didn’t ask. It felt wrong to say more words than I had to. She drove with the radio off and I did my best to keep my mind blank, to not think about the empty basement back at my dad’s place.
After we got onto Main Street, it became easier to think about things besides my brother. Because my mother was right: the tornado’s damage was different in the light. The streets that had been without power the night before, the ones hidden in the dark, were the streets hit the hardest. Entire houses were crumbled, their frames warped and broken. Trees lay atop smashed cars, and random yards burned. Strangers walked up and down their once familiar neighborhoods, like zombies that had arisen from the dead after decades underground, who clawed their way out of their graves only to find everything they knew beyond recognition.
More than once we were forced to detour. On our way to wherever it was we were going. My mother sped from one street to another as though we were being chased, and as soon as we thought we had escaped, a mountain of debris blocked our way. My mother punched the steering wheel each time we were cut off, made a U-turn, and peeled out in the opposite direction. This happened several times, until eventually we pulled into an unharmed gas station, with a liquor store attached. I couldn’t remember being here before. My mother put the van in park.
“It’s not open,” she said. “After all that.”
I looked where she was looking, at the Open sign, cursive and unlit. The insides of both stores were dark and unmoving. My mother slumped in her seat and closed her eyes. She started to cry. Loudly and without shame. Then, suddenly, she stopped, and although I thought she would feel better, she didn’t.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” she said. “You should have said something.”
I turned from the window and faced my mother, her blue eyes reddened with sadness and disbelief. “This man, this Chris — all this time! You could have stopped him! Why didn’t you tell anyone what was going on?”