Chapter ten

On the day of the tornado, Ronnie had been delayed at work by an irate customer who wouldn’t leave until she’d had her say, no matter how ominous the sky looked. Normally, this wouldn’t have bothered Ronnie too much, because he understood that when you managed a hardware chain store, you didn’t ever get out at the time you were supposed to get out. You got angry customers, or guys late in returning the rental flatbeds, or indecisive women who sauntered into the store five minutes before closing and stared at the mailbox display for half an hour.

But with the sky looking so ominous, he was anxious to get the customer out of the store so he could get home. There was a storm coming, and the weather radio had been saying the possibility of tornadoes was high.

Ronnie was like everyone else in Elizabeth—he didn’t get too worked up about storms. But this one felt different somehow. Ronnie said he couldn’t explain it. He felt uneasy, and like he needed to get home to me and Mom and Marin before the bad weather hit.

But he’d gotten delayed. And by the time he’d hit the highway, it was too late.

“I could see it from the road, ” he told me, the two of us sitting in shadows in our motel room. Neither of us had bothered to turn on the light. Neither of us would bother to turn it on for the whole next day, either. I think we were each afraid to see the other, afraid that our brokenness would become contagious if we shined light on it. “I’ve seen videos of tornadoes before, but, Jersey, I’ve never seen anything like this. It was huge. Had all these little tornadoes circling it, too. The thing was so big it looked like it could swallow the whole world.”

It did, I thought. It swallowed my whole world. But I didn’t say anything aloud. I sat on my bed, staring at the wallpaper across the room, unsure whether the design was pineapples or diamonds, and listened.

“I tried to beat it home, I really did, ” he said. “But it kind of veered off toward me and I had to stop the truck. Everybody was stopping their cars in the middle of the highway and running as fast as they could to the underpass. So that’s where I went, too.” He shifted forward, resting his elbows on his knees so that his words fell directly to the floor. “It never went over us. But I could feel it. The wind, I mean. It was so loud. And it had… I don’t know… a smell to it. Like… electricity or something.”

Immediately I was taken back to my spot under the pool table, the wind roaring around me, tugging at my clothes, my hair. Like it was alive.

“I keep thinking about your mom, ” he said. “And Marin.” And once again he was choked with sobs, as he had been off and on since I’d come up behind him in the wreckage of his bedroom. “They must have been so scared.”

Rescuers had found them yesterday, not too far from where Kolby and I had been standing. Apparently, when the storm had started rolling in, Janice had decided that their building was too full of windows to be safe, and since it had no basement, everyone had rushed across the street to Fenderman’s Grocery. Ronnie said he thought maybe they were hoping to get into the milk cooler.

But they didn’t make it in time.

Janice and three others survived. Three of the moms had crawled out of the downed building, crying weakly for help. Janice had not yet regained consciousness. None of the little girls in Marin’s class made it. Not one.

According to Ronnie, rescuers rushed to Fenderman’s Grocery right away, picking through the massive bulk under the curtain of rain, until the one remaining emergency siren—the one too far on the other end of town for us to hear on our end—cranked up another tornado warning and they’d been forced to take cover. In the morning, after the sun came out and only hours before Kolby and I were trekking toward Sixth Street, a crowd of helpers—including my stepdad—fell on Fenderman’s again. They found eleven employees—alive and well—wedged inside one of the walk-ins. And in the aisles heading toward the walk-ins they’d found everyone else. Including Mom and Marin, who were buried under a massive shelf of canned goods.

Marin’s hands were over her ears, Ronnie said. Mom had been lying over her, trying to protect her.

I thought about all the times I’d told Marin that the storm was fine. That it was only noise. That it couldn’t hurt her as long as she was inside.

I wondered if she’d remembered I’d told her those things. I wondered if she’d died feeling like I’d lied to her.

Is the noise fine, Jersey? Is it over?

Yes, Marin, you’ll be fine. It’s just noise.

Dance the East Coast Swing with me, Jersey! Miss Janice taught us. It’s fun!

No! Go away! You’re blocking the TV!

But the noise…

It’s fine! Just go!

Three moms had made it out. But none of them were my mom. It seemed impossible that the same wind that had left my fragile porcelain kitten untouched could have destroyed the flesh and bone of my mother.

“Where are they now? ” I asked Ronnie, closing my eyes. The stupid wallpaper design had imprinted itself into my eyelids—purple blobs against the black.

“At the morgue, ” he said. “I went to the hospital, but it was chaos in there. So many people. And a lot of people still missing. So I went home and you weren’t there. I had no idea where you were and I thought maybe you’d gone with your mom and sister to dance class, so I went back to Fenderman’s to try and find you. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I was looking for them, too, ” I said, a big tear rolling down my cheek. In my mind flashed a thousand images. Images of my mom and me, all the fun things we did, all the times she made me feel special and loved and happy. Images of Marin, who was so sweet and innocent and who I resented for being the baby, even though I knew it wasn’t her fault. She looked up to me and wanted me to accept her as a person. She wanted me to say she was cool. She wanted me to look up to her, too.

I realized that the worst part of someone you love dying suddenly isn’t the saying good-bye part. It’s the part where you wonder if they knew how much you loved them. It’s the part where you hope you said and did enough good stuff to make up for the bad stuff. It’s the part where there are no second chances, no going back, no more opportunities to tell them how you feel about them.

At some point I drifted off, and though I woke a few times to the coarse sobs of my stepdad in the bed next to mine, I slept better than I had in two days. I’d showered and changed into the clothes I’d picked up at home. I’d used the toilet and had eaten a hamburger that Ronnie had fetched for me. And it felt like forever since I had been in a bed.

But when I woke in the morning, I was no longer confused about where I was. I was no longer waking up to those blissful thirty seconds or so of forgetting about the tornado. I was aware of it from the very moment I opened my eyes. It was all I could think about.

On the third day, Ronnie was gone when I awoke. He’d left a note, along with a box of doughnuts, saying he was at the house and would be stopping by the hospital later.

There was a part of me that wished he’d asked me if I wanted to go, too, but then I decided I didn’t want to go back to the house. Ever. There were too many memories there. Memories of things I knew I would never get back. I would never again listen to Mom singing along to the radio while washing dishes or hear Marin laugh over some dumb slapstick stunt on one of her favorite cartoons. I would never again put towels in that dryer or crumble hamburger in a skillet to have dinner ready after dance. Those things were gone, and I didn’t want to find them.

But the hospital. Ronnie was also going to the hospital. Why hadn’t he asked if I wanted to go, too? Would they let me see Mom and Marin? Would I be able to look if they did? I ached so hard to lay eyes on them, even if the thought of identifying dead bodies freaked me out, made my limbs go tingly with fear.

When my phone was fully charged, I texted Kolby.

U make it to Milton?

He answered right away. Yes. Where are you? You safe?

At motel in Prairie Valley with Ronnie.

Ur mom?

I gripped the phone against my chest, unsure if my fingers could type out the words. In the end I settled on only one: No.

There was a long silence before my phone vibrated with his response. God. I’m sorry.

Thanks. Me too, I typed back.

What are you gonna do? he asked.

It was my turn to pause. I still couldn’t wrap my head around what life would be like with just Ronnie and me. It seemed like it would be so silent and depressing and impossible. I don’t know, I typed.

Keep me posted ok? Let me know if you need anything.

Yep, I answered, and I knew I could. The tornado had ripped so much away from me, but I still had Kolby. I was grateful to at least have that much, to at least have someone to lean on.

Ronnie didn’t come home until it was dusk outside, and I spent the entire day in bed, alternately watching news footage about the tornado and drifting off in fitful naps where I dreamed about my friends, all bloodied and battered and wondering why I hadn’t died along with them.

The tornado’s path was much easier to get a grip on by watching aerial coverage. They said it was nearly eight miles long and two miles wide. They said the downtown area—the area of Fenderman’s Grocery and Mace Tools and Janice’s Dance Studio—was hit the worst and was where most of the victims were found. They estimated more than 120 dead, and lots of people were still missing. With every minute that someone wasn’t found, the prognosis looked worse and worse. If those who were still trapped didn’t die from their injuries, they could die from dehydration instead.

Every few minutes victims would appear before the camera, recounting what they’d gone through. Some of them still looked shell-shocked. Others didn’t appear to be taking it so seriously. Almost all of them had lost nearly everything they had.

Despite myself, I scanned the crowds behind the people on camera, hoping for a glimpse of my mom or my sister. I knew that Ronnie had seen them at Fenderman’s, had pulled them out of the rubble himself, but still a part of me wanted to believe that they might have survived. That Ronnie had been in shock and he was wrong about what he’d seen. Maybe he’d found two other people who just happened to resemble Mom and Marin. Doppelgä ngers. Happened all the time.

I also scanned the faces for signs of Jane and Dani, especially when the news showed footage of the high school, which had been ripped nearly in two. The newscasters said the tornado appeared to have skipped right down the middle of the field house. People had left flowers and teddy bears and notes on the front lawn. But nobody said whether anyone in the high school had lived or died.

God, what would I do if Jane and Dani had died, too?

I pushed the thought away and tried instead to focus on an old sitcom rerun, but within a few minutes my mind wandered to the tragedy that was our town, and I flipped the news on again.

When Ronnie came back, he didn’t say a word to me. He barged through the door, letting it slam shut behind him, and walked straight to the bathroom.

“You see them? ” I asked as he passed me by, but he didn’t answer. He disappeared into the bathroom and seconds later I heard the shower hiss to life.

“You see them? ” I asked again when he came back out of the shower, wearing a pair of shorts I didn’t recognize, but he only fell face-first onto his bed, pulled the blankets up around his ears, and within minutes was snoring.

I blinked at the TV, wondering whether I should turn it off. I hadn’t eaten since the doughnuts he’d left for breakfast, and my stomach was growling.

“Ronnie? ” I asked a couple of times, my voice sounding very loud in the small room, even though it felt like I was whispering. He was exhausted. Physically and emotionally. I understood, or at least I tried to. Because if I let myself think about how physically and emotionally tired I was, if I let myself feel it, I might pass out, too. I would sleep for days.

I gathered the change he’d left on the night table and got some chips out of a vending machine for dinner, then fell asleep, too.

The next day, Ronnie didn’t get out of bed at all. He moaned and turned over when I said his name, then pulled the dingy blanket up to cover his head. I was running out of change, so I dug his wallet out of the pants he’d left puddled on the bathroom floor, and used his credit card to order a pizza. I saved him half, but he never got up to eat it.

For most of the afternoon, I watched TV coverage, but it was getting spottier as news crews found new tragedies to focus on. I decided to try Jane and Dani. I went down to the motel lobby and sank into the ratty couch so I could talk without having to worry about waking up Ronnie.

I dialed Jane’s cell, but it rang and rang. Either the call didn’t go through, or she wasn’t answering. I refused to think of the third option—that it might be buried with her under our broken high school.

I hung up, then called Dani. She answered on the second ring.

“Oh my God, Jersey! ” she cried. “Are you okay? Where are you? ”

My stomach fluttered with relief, and immediately tears squeezed out onto my cheeks. “You’re okay, ” I breathed, which I knew didn’t answer either of her questions, but those were the only words that would come out.

“Yeah, I’m fine. It pretty much missed our house. Broke all the windows in my brother’s car, though. Where are you? ”

“At a motel with Ronnie. Did you see the school? ”

“Yeah. It’s trashed. They said there won’t be any more school this year. Obviously. So it’s summer break now. What a crappy way to start summer break. You hear anything from Jane? ”

“No. You? ”

“No. A lot of people still can’t get cell service. I tried to call you, by the way, but it wouldn’t go through. But everybody I’ve heard from seems to be pretty much the same. Freaked out. Lost all their stuff. I’m glad you guys made it through okay.”

I paused, blinking rapidly. I opened my mouth, but my throat felt closed tight. We didn’t. We didn’t make it through okay at all.

“What about Kolby? ”

I took a deep breath, steadied myself. “He’s fine. He went to Milton. But, Dani… I have to tell you something.” I paused again, unsure of how to say it. I’d never had to give anyone bad news before—not like this—and I wasn’t sure how you eased into it. Instead, I blurted it out, my mouth working faster than my brain. “My mom died. And so did Marin.”

There was such utter silence on the other end of the line, I could hear myself breathing into the speaker. When Dani spoke again, her voice was barely more than a whisper. “Are you serious? ”

I nodded, unable to speak, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me nodding, and I felt stupid, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. The words wouldn’t come out.

“Oh my God, Jersey. I don’t know what to say.” There was a long, wrenching silence. “I’m so sorry.”

“So yeah, we’re in Prairie Valley right now, ” I said, swallowing, trying to get control of myself and get as far away from the word “died” as possible. “I don’t know when we’ll be back home. Our house is pretty much gone.”

“I know. We drove around a little last night. My mom wanted to take pictures so she could send them to my grandma in Indiana. I guess all those houses have to be rebuilt. Is Ronnie going to rebuild yours? ”

“I don’t know. He isn’t talking.”

Dani’s voice went soft. “Yeah, I guess he’s pretty messed up right now. I can’t believe they died. Do you know when the funerals will be? ”

“No. Ronnie isn’t talking. About anything. He’s not even getting out of bed.” I considered telling her that I’d been stealing money out of his pants so I could eat, and that I was wearing the same underwear I’d been wearing when the tornado hit, and that I was starting to get scared that he would never get out of bed and that I would starve to death or something stupid because I was too numb to think of how I could save myself. But I didn’t want to worry her any more than I already had, so I let the silence sit between us again.

“Listen, ” she finally said. “I’d have to ask my mom, but if you need to come stay with us, at least until the funerals are over, I’m sure it would be okay with her. We don’t have any power and our roof is leaking in, like, ten places, but they’re going to fix it today and they’re saying we might get power back by the end of the week, maybe.”

Part of me wanted to jump at the chance. I wanted to tell Dani to come get me right now, wanted to hop into her car and let her mom soothe everything the way my mom would have done if she had just stayed home, if she had just skipped Marin’s dance class. I would borrow Dani’s clothes and be happy to wear something that smelled like fabric softener rather than sweat and rainwater, even though she was easily two sizes smaller than I was. I would eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, thick on the peanut butter, and drink endless sodas, even if they were warm and I had to eat by candlelight.

But I couldn’t do it. I kept thinking about how much Mom loved Ronnie and how disappointed she would be in me if I left him, stinking up the bedsheets and mopping his unwashed face with the pillow, starving himself to death because he wouldn’t get up to eat. Even if I’d never had a deep connection with Ronnie, Mom had loved him like mad, and I couldn’t leave him, because Mom wouldn’t want me to.

“Okay, thanks, I’ll tell Ronnie.”

“Just call me.”

“I will. I should go. If you hear from Jane, let me know, okay? ”

“Of course. I’m sure she’s fine. You shouldn’t worry.”

“Yeah, ” I said, but how did we know? Not everyone came out of the tornado fine. I didn’t come out fine at all.

“And, Jers? ”

“Huh? ”

“Let me know when the funerals are? I want to come.”

I squeezed my eyes tighter; a tear slipped out and down one cheek. Burying my mother and my sister seemed like something I just couldn’t do. I wasn’t strong enough. I wanted my mom. I needed her. How depressingly ironic that the one person I needed to give me strength to face my mom’s death was the one who’d died.

“I will.” I hung up and sat with the phone in my lap for a few minutes, staring at the water that dripped off the bottom of the window air conditioner into a plastic tub on the floor.

“You okay? ” the desk clerk asked, leaning over the counter to peer at me. She twisted her watch around on her wrist anxiously.

I nodded. “Fine.” A lie. I got up and started to walk toward the door.

“It’s real terrible what happened over there in Elizabeth, ” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m real sorry about it.”

“Thanks.” I hurried out of the office as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to hear anyone else tell me they were sorry. What did I’m sorry mean, exactly, when someone had died? Wouldn’t it be much more accurate to say I’m grateful when someone close to you was hit by tragedy? I’m grateful, as in, I’m grateful that this didn’t happen to me. At least that would be honest.

I stood outside and looked up at the sky. The day was sunny and warm again, and here, twenty miles away from home, it almost seemed like a normal day. Except on a normal day I would be in chem class right now, excited about theater club practice and the lighting cues I still had to learn. On a normal day I would be seeing Mom tonight, would be telling Marin that I was too busy, too busy, always too busy.

I gazed down the line of motel room doors. Behind one of those, Ronnie was drowning in his own grief. Behind one of them, he was alone and I was alone, only feet apart, unable to talk about the things we needed to say.

I couldn’t go in there. Not yet.

Instead, I turned and walked down the sidewalk, Ronnie’s credit card in my pocket.

I wandered past a strip mall, which was filled with real estate offices and computer repair shops and dry cleaners, and headed toward a big chain pharmacy a short distance away. My clothes and shoes felt coarse and gross against my skin. I gazed at all the perfect buildings, the perfect people. Why had they been spared?

I stopped at the pharmacy and filled a cart with packages of ugly underwear and socks that I normally wouldn’t be caught dead in, T-shirts and flip-flops emblazoned with the logo and mascot of a high school I’d never attended, and packs of chips and cookies and cups of Easy Mac. I stood for a long time in front of the cold section, letting the refrigeration fall over me in waves, closing my eyes and soaking it up until my arms were goose bump-y and tight. After I’d bought as much as I could carry, I walked back to the motel, shopping bags looped over my arms, wondering how I was going to lure Ronnie out of bed.

What would Mom want me to do?

If Ronnie and I had been closer, maybe I would know. But Mom had always been the buffer between us, had always been the one trying to bridge a relationship where there really wasn’t one.

“You can call him Dad, you know, ” she’d said one night not long after they got married. “He’s technically your dad now.”

“My dad lives in Caster City, ” I’d said, my bulbous ten-year-old belly sticking out under the bottom of my shirt.

“That man, ” my mom had said, her eyes fiery and narrow, “was never a dad. A dad doesn’t just abandon his child. Ronnie would never be that kind of dad.”

I knew she was right, of course. And it wasn’t like I had any deep connection with my so-called dad in Caster City. Even by the time I was ten, I couldn’t remember what my real father looked like. I didn’t have one single memory of the two of us together. But I always kept Ronnie at a distance anyway. Maybe being abandoned by my real dad was why I’d always kept Ronnie at arm’s distance. How many dads was I going to give the chance to hurt me?

I stood outside the room for a few seconds, key card in hand, while I took a deep, readying breath.

But when I pushed open the door, Ronnie’s unmade bed was empty. The bathroom door was open, the light out—he wasn’t in there, either. Relieved, I shut the door and hustled to the bathroom myself, anxious to put on some clean underwear and then eat a quiet dinner by the TV.

It wasn’t until somewhere around 3 AM, when I woke to find the TV still on and Ronnie’s bed still empty, that I began to wonder where he might have gone.