Authors: Blake Crouch,J. A. Konrath
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“If you understood, if you could be in my head for two minutes, it would.”
The interior lights cut out.
Peter said, “This morning, you asked me where I lived, and I told you I was from
Providence
.”
“So?”
“That wasn’t really the truth. I lived there a long time ago, but I don’t really live anywhere now. I bought this RV in 1987. Been my home ever since.” Out Peter’s window, a lightning bug flared against the glass. “It’s the hardest thing right now for me not to ask you to get out.”
Melanie opened her door.
“I’m not saying I want you to.”
“
I
need some air.”
She climbed out of the Winnebago and walked across the gravel drive, easing down on the front porch steps. Peter looked at the keys dangling from the ignition. He touched them. Opened his door and stepped down into the grass.
Lightning bugs everywhere.
A lone cricket screeching maniacally.
He sat beside her on the steps. Cool and he could smell warm hay carried on the breeze.
Said, “In the winters, I seek out ice storms and blizzards. Tornadoes and hurricanes in the summertime. I was in
Charleston
when Hugo roared ashore in ’89. I was in
Florida
for Andrew in ’92. The Lower Ninth Ward last summer when the levies broke. I’ve spent winters at Paradise Lodge on the south slope of
Rainier
just to watch it dump nine hundred inches of snow. A couple years ago I stayed a month at the observatory on
Mount Washington
. Stood in a hundred and forty mile-per-hour wind that almost blew me off the mountain. I feel…dead…all the time, except when I’m in the middle of some storm, watching the clouds swirl, feeling the snow or rain pelt my face. It doesn’t make sense, I know, but this is what I do, and I’ve been doing it for twenty years, and I came to Hoxie to do it, and then I met you, and for a minute—I don’t know why—I wanted to share it with you.”
“Do you have family, Peter?”
The question caused him to flinch. “I don’t have anyone. Look, I’m sorry. I’ve got nothing to offer you. I know that. I just want you to understand that it’s not your fault. Has nothing to do with you. The reason it turned out like it did today is ’cause I—”
“You have issues.”
“Yeah.”
“A lot of them.”
“Now why are you crying?”
“’Cause you hurt my feelings, dummy.” She wiped her face, got up, and hurried into the house, the door slamming after her. He could hear her crying through the thin walls.
Pushed himself onto his feet and climbed the two flimsy steps to the stoop, where he pulled open the screened door and knocked on the wood of the inner door.
“Melanie, come on. Can we talk please?”
The cries more distant now, lost inside the house.
“I’m coming in, all right?” He tried the door. The knob turned, hinges creaking as he let it swing open. “Melanie?”
He stepped into a foyer, the air redolent of cardboard.
There were boxes everywhere—stacked to the ceiling on either side of the hallway that ran past the stairs into the kitchen, leaving the walkway so tight he would’ve had to sidestep to pass through. At first, he thought Melanie must be in the process of moving, wondered why she hadn’t mentioned it before, but then his eyes fell on the living room.
He’d never seen anything like it.
Four television sets, three
A leather couch buried beneath stacks of
National Geographic
and
The New Yorker
.
A coffee table caved in under the weight of several full sets of encyclopedias.
Out from under the couch, a gray cat darted over a pile of clothes that still bore their price tags, disappearing into a dining room paralyzed for the stacks of newspapers, eight grills, still in their boxes, and what he estimated to be over five hundred unopened packages of plastic utensils monopolizing every square inch of table space.
He made his way through the cramped hall, and as he neared the kitchen the smell of rotting food became overpowering. He held the side of his arm across his nose and mouth, and standing in the doorway, wondered how Melanie even made use of the Fridge and the sink and the oven range what with the linoleum buried under hundreds of pounds of canned food and sacks of flour and sugar, thirty cereal boxes, and on the countertops, a component of the stench—clusters of bananas and apples and what might have been oranges, all shriveled and glazed with blue mold.
“What are you doing?”
He spun around.
Melanie stood at the foot of the stairs, her face red.
“I knocked on the door, I—”
“Did you hear me say come in?”
“No.”
“Get out.”
“Melanie—”
“Get out of my house!” Tears ran down the sides of her face and she breathed so hard he could see her chest billowing under her button-down shirt.
“All right,” he said.
He started down the hallway between the walls of cardboard boxes, Melanie backing toward the stairs as he approached the foyer. She collapsed on a lower step and buried her head between her knees, her shoulders bobbing as she wept.
At the door, Peter glanced back. Melanie hadn’t lifted her head, and that cat was slinking between her ankles in figure-
eights
and purring like it meant to sooth her.
He said, “For the record, I think you’re beautiful.”
She wouldn’t lift her head, and her words came spliced with tears. “Please, Peter. I just need you to leave. I can’t stand this. I can’t stand you seeing this.”
“It’s okay, Mel. You don’t have anything—”
“What?” She looked up. “To be ashamed of? Is that what you were going to—”
“No, I—”
Her eyes bugged, her face darkened into scarlet, and she sprang up off the stairs and grabbed his shirt, balling the fabric in her hands and shoving him into the doorframe.
“Do not fuck with me,” she whispered.
“I’m not. I swear.”
“No one. No one has come in here…” It felt like two concurrent slaps, both hands slamming into his cheeks, open-palmed, squeezing his face, drawing it down, her lips barely chapped, her tongue warm. She didn’t kiss him as hard as he feared, though since he hadn’t touched his lips to those of another human being’s in twenty years, three months, and eight days, a point of reference was lacking.
They broke apart, breathless.
Melanie leaned her forehead against his sternum, and Peter stared over the top of her head at the cat who watched him from midway up the stairs.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asked.
“Yes. No.”
He touched the point of her chin. Lifted her head. She stared up at him through a sheet of tears that evacuated from her eyes when she blinked. “I haven’t always lived like this.”
“Me either.”
“When you walked into the restaurant…I don’t know how to put it in—”
“You don’t have to put it any way. I know.”
“Are you lonely, Peter?”
“All the time.”
“Do you want to come upstairs with me?”
“Melanie, I haven’t…in a long time.”
“Makes two of us.”
“I’m not even sure if—”
She put her finger to his lips.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not about that.”
He came almost instantly and he told her he was sorry, that he knew this would happen and that he had tried to warn her. He lay between her legs in the dark in an upstairs bedroom, his hamstrings trembling, their chests heaving against each other.
“Peter, shut up. It’s okay.”
He pulled away but she clasped her legs around his back.
“Please,” she whispered. “Not yet.”
He rested his head on her shoulder as the bedroom flashed with electric blue. Out on the prairie it sounded like someone was moving furniture around—distant thunder.
“Do you want to leave?” she asked.
“No.”
“Is that the truth?”
“It is actually.”
He turned his head so he could see the lightning flicker across the stacks of boxes that diminished the bedroom into something the size of a walk-in closet.
“Peter?”
“Yes?”
“Why’d you leave
Providence
?”
“I was the head meteorologist at WPRI. Two months after...”
When he didn’t finish the sentence, she ran her fingers through his hair and said, “After what?”
“Can I just leave it at that?”
“Of course.”
“Two months after, I had a nervous breakdown on-air. You can find the footage on YouTube. Over a half-million views last time I checked. I left town, never looked back. How long have you lived here?”
“Nine years. You want to know what happened?”
“Do you want to tell me? Otherwise, it doesn’t matter.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “I can feel your heart beating against my chest. It feels good.”
Later, they lay in bed listening to the rain on the tin roof, Peter sliding his fingers down the side of her arm as he had touched his wife in a previous life, and telling her about the time he almost died when Hurricane Bertha hit
Kure
Beach
on the
North Carolina
coast. He’d ventured out to the end of a seven hundred-foot pier in the
eyewall
, clinging to the rail as twenty-foot waves crashed into the framework and hundred mile-per-hour rain and
seaspray
lacerated his face. He’d heard the outer pilings begin to crack and started the long crawl back to shore, just reaching the beach as the wind and waves tore the pier off the pilings.
He told her about the night he spent on the summit of Mount Mitchell in the ’93
Superstorm
, about the time he almost killed himself when a southern blizzard didn’t pan out, about the calm and silent eye of Andrew and its perfect black circle of starry sky, about a December night in Fairbanks, Alaska, when the thermometer hit -58° F, and in the freezing fog his spit would crackle midair, striking the pavement as a blob of sleet. She laughed at that one, thought he was pulling her leg.
They didn’t belabor, as Peter had feared, the circumstances that had brought them to this moment. As she’d said, it wasn’t about that.
Exhaustion and contentment brought increasingly expansive lulls. Then they lay in silence, both facing the tall window beside Melanie’s bed. When the lightning came and the prairie flashed into existence through the heat-warped glass, Peter would catch the fleeting sense that this house and the two of them lying naked upstairs in bed was all that was left of the world.
Glass rattling in the sill wrenched Peter out of sleep and he returned to consciousness as the peal of thunder faded out.
He sat up, rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
The darkness through the window tinged with gray.
A jag of lightning split it down the middle.
Melanie moaned, half-asleep, “What are you doing?”
Peter swung his legs over the side of the bed and stepped into his briefs and jeans, still conjoined on the floor.
“I need to go read the Goodland advisories.”
“It’s…five-twenty in the morning.”
“Those sound like major storms out there.”
They hurried down the front porch steps, the grasses thrashing and the air making their eyes water, filled with dust and slivers of chaff.
In the RV, Peter opened the laptop and pulled up the National Weather Service page he’d bookmarked upon his arrival in Hoxie.
“Oh, man,” he said.
“What?”
“Come look.”
BULLETIN -
TORNADO WARNING
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GOODLAND KS
517 AM
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN GOODLAND
* TORNADO WARNING FOR...
NORTH CENTRAL SHERIDAN COUNTY IN NORTHWEST KANSAS...
* UNTIL 630 AM