Torn Away (2 page)

After Mom and Marin left, I got up and put the towels in the washing machine. It had gotten so dark I had to turn on the overhead light to see what I was doing. The cloud cover almost made it feel like nighttime.

I poured soap over the towels, thinking once again how it seemed like everything had changed when Mom married Ronnie. I’d gone from being the most important thing in her life to being
one of
the most important things in her life. Sounds like the same thing, but it isn’t. Sharing the spotlight gets kind of crowded sometimes, especially when you were used to having so much space in it before.

When Mom got pregnant, I was excited. Being an only child could get lonely, and I’d always envied my friends who had siblings. I didn’t think ten years was that much difference, really. I thought Marin would look up to me and I could teach her all kinds of things and be like her hero or something. But
what I hadn’t banked on was that there would be a lot of years where she would be a baby.
The
baby. The center of everything.

And even though I knew I was that once, too, it still sucked when it was her turn. Which made me feel like a jerk. What kind of horrible person resented her little sister for something she couldn’t even control?

After I got the laundry started, I went into the kitchen and pulled out the hamburger meat and a skillet. I crumbled the burger into the skillet and turned on the stove, then wandered back toward the living room to watch some more TV while I waited for the meat to start cooking. On the way, I grabbed my backpack off the kitchen table, dug my reading homework out of it—
hint, hint, ladies and gentlemen!
—and carried it to the couch with me.

But as I turned on the lamp next to the couch and sat down, the TV station switched to the news, a meteorologist standing in front of a giant map with a radar image on it, a bright red patch moving across the screen in jumps and fits.

I picked up my book and started reading, waiting for him to finish talking and get back to the show. Seemed like every time a raindrop or snowflake fell anywhere near Elizabeth, the weather forecasters acted like the end of the world was coming.

I read, tuning in and out of what he was saying, catching bits and pieces.

… system that is producing tornadoes in Clay County is moving east at approximately… seems to be picking up speed… had two reported touchdowns… headed toward… will hit Elizabeth at five sixteen…

I heard the meat start to sizzle in the kitchen and put down my book. Rain or shine, we still had to eat.

As soon as I picked up the spatula, the sirens started.

I paused, my hand in the air, and listened. One of the sirens was in a field behind my old elementary school, two blocks away from our house, so it was loud. When I was a kid, the tornado sirens used to freak me out. They used to freak all of us out, and the teachers were always having to tell us to calm down. Kids would be crying, holding their palms over their ears and asking for their moms, and the teachers would be standing at the front of the room with their hands up in the air, shouting to be heard over us and the sirens, reminding us that they were only monthly tests and there was no emergency. By fifth grade, we were all cool about it—
Oh, it’s the tornado sirens, no big deal
—and by middle school we barely even noticed the sirens at all.

I leaned back and glanced into the living room, where the meteorologist was still standing in front of the Doppler photo, still pointing and talking, a sheaf of papers in his right hand. I sighed, looking back at the half-cooked meat. I didn’t want to turn it off, only to have it be another false alarm and have dinner ruined and Mom pissed. But technically, we were under a tornado warning. And even though there was a warning about every third week in Elizabeth, we were supposed to take it seriously each time and go downstairs.

Hardly anyone ever did, though. Midwest weather was crazy, after all, and half the time too crazy to really predict. We’d all learned to ignore the warnings. Most of them never turned out to be anything anyway.

I moved over to the kitchen sink and peered out the window.
I could see wind pushing the swings on our neighbors’ swing set. The rings danced merrily, and the slide quivered. Kolby, who’d lived next door to me since we were toddlers, was standing outside on his back porch, hands in his pockets, gazing up into the sky, his hair whipping around so that I could see his scalp with each gust. Kolby always did this when the weather turned bad. A lot of people did, actually. They wanted the chance to see a funnel cloud for themselves, should one ever appear. I reached up and knocked on the window. He didn’t hear me. I knocked again, louder, and he turned, pulled a hand out of his pocket, and waved. I waved back.

He was peering out over Church Street, where plenty of cars were creeping along with their headlights on. Rush hour was starting and everyone was coming home, like normal. It wasn’t even raining.

I went back to the stove, still holding the spatula, and decided to wait until it started to rain or do something more serious than just look nasty.

But I had no more than touched the meat with the spatula when the power went out, bathing me in darkness and that blatting of the emergency sirens, which went on and on, so loud I only barely heard the buzz of the blinds in the laundry room as the wind pressed against the house harder and harder.

“Great,” I said aloud. “I guess we’ll have McDonald’s for dinner, then.”

I put the spatula down and turned off the stove, then grabbed my backpack, stuffing my book inside, and headed for the basement, aka Ronnie’s Room.

The basement wasn’t a terrible place to kill time, especially
since Ronnie had put a pool table, a couch, and a mini-fridge down there. Every so often he’d have some friends over and they’d all disappear downstairs, and we could hear pool balls cracking up against one another and smell the cigarette smoke as it drifted up through the living room carpet. He didn’t love us hanging out in his space, but tonight I had no choice.

I rummaged around on Ronnie’s worktable and found a flashlight, then clicked it on; it worked. Giving a quick glance to the one small window—it was still dark and windy—I flopped down on the couch and opened my book.

My phone buzzed and I pulled it out of my pocket.

“Hey, Dani, I guess it’s a good time to catch up on some reading for tomorrow’s quiz,” I said in my Miss Sopor impression.

“Are you downstairs?” Dani’s voice was worried, thin.

“Yep. Waste of time, but since the power’s out, I have nothing better to do, I guess.”

“My mom said a tornado touched down on M Highway. She said it’s headed right toward us. She wanted me to make sure you knew.”

M Highway was closer than I wanted it to be, and that news startled me a little, but it was still the country out there. It seemed like tornadoes were touching down on those country highways all the time.

“Yeah, I heard the sirens. I’m good,” I said, though I realized that my voice might have sounded a bit thin, too.

“Is Jane still at school?” Dani asked.

“I haven’t heard from her,” I said. “I can text her.”

“I already did. She didn’t answer.”

“They were probably playing and she didn’t hear her phone.”
Plus
, I added inside my head,
the orchestra room is in the basement anyway. She’s fine.
“I’ll try her. Kolby is standing outside right now.”

Dani made a noise into the phone. “I’m not surprised. He’s nuts. He’s not gonna be happy until he gets carried away in a tornado.”

“It’s not even raining out there.”

“Still, he’s crazy. One touched down on M Highway.”

“I know.”

“Call me if you talk to Jane?”

“Okay.”

I hung up and sent Jane a quick text. The sirens stopped for a minute and I would have thought maybe the storm was passing, but it had gotten even darker outside, and then they started up again.

I chewed my lip, held my phone in my lap for a few seconds, then called Mom.

“Jersey?” she shouted into the phone. The noise around her was even louder. Emergency horns, police sirens, and the loud chatter and crying of little girls. “Jersey?”

“Dani’s mom said a tornado was on M Highway,” I said.

“I can’t hear her,” I heard my mom say, and another woman’s voice close by said something about more touchdowns. “Jersey?” Mom repeated.

“I’m here!” I shouted. “Hello! Can you hear me?”

“Jersey? I can’t hear you. If you can hear me, go to the basement, okay?” she yelled.

“I am,” I said, but I knew she couldn’t hear what I was saying, and fear really began to creep into my stomach. She sounded afraid. Mom never sounded afraid. Ever. She never wavered; she was always strong. Even when I fell off the monkey bars in second grade and landed straight on my neck and had to go in an ambulance to the hospital. Mom had simply sat next to me in the ambulance, talking in a low, steady voice, one that calmed me. “Mom? Hello? You there?”

“Everybody this way!” she shouted, her voice sounding farther away from the phone, like maybe she was holding it at her side and had forgotten that it was on. There was a bustling noise, and the crying and talking got louder and more jumbled and then was overtaken by a rumbling sound.

“Mom?” I said.

But she didn’t answer. I could hear her shouting, “Get your heads down! Get your heads down!” and lots of screaming and crying. I thought I might have heard glass breaking.

And then I heard nothing but the drone of the sirens outside my window.

“Mom? Mom!” I kept yelling into the phone, even though I knew the connection had been lost. I tried to call again, but the line wouldn’t connect. I realized that my hands were shaking, and my fingers didn’t want to work around the phone’s keypad anymore. I dropped it twice and then tried to call Ronnie, but that call wouldn’t go through, either.

The sirens screeched one last time and then abruptly stopped, and I could hear wild clicking against the window—hail—and something else. Something louder. Thumps and thuds and scrapes against the house, like larger items were slamming up against it. Metallic clangs and broken sounds.

For a moment I sat there, frozen on the couch. I thought I heard what sounded like a train rumbling down our street, and I remembered one time in fourth grade when our teacher read us a book that described the sound of a tornado as being something like the sound of a locomotive. I hadn’t believed it
at the time—it didn’t make sense that a tornado could sound like anything but blowing wind. But there it was, the sound of a train passing. I held my breath in frightened anticipation.

The moment stretched around me—the noise getting louder and then muting as my ears began popping—and I gripped my cell phone like I was holding on to the side of a cliff. I tried to be still so I could listen. Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe it was my imagination and there was no train sound out there. I was hearing what I was scared to hear.

But then something really huge hit the house. I heard the tinkling of glass breaking upstairs, on the other end of the house, over where Marin’s bedroom was. A loud metallic grating noise seared the air outside as something was pushed down the street. I only had seconds to think about Kolby, to wonder if he was still out there, when the basement window suddenly shattered, ushering in an enormous roar of noise.

I screamed, my voice getting lost in the din. I instinctively covered my head and then scrambled under the pool table, pulling my backpack and cell phone with me.

Noise blasted in and I rolled up in a ball, cradling my head with my arms. I squeezed my eyes shut. There were great, loud creaks and bangs. Glass shattering and shattering and shattering. Thunks as things spun and flew and hit walls. Groans and wooden popping sounds as walls gave, bricks tumbled. Crunching thuds as heavy building materials hit the floors.

I heard these things happening, but it was unclear where exactly they were happening. Was it in the basement? Upstairs? Down the street? Space and time were distorted, and even the most basic things like direction didn’t make sense.

Wind whipped the hem of my shirt and pulled at my hair, and I felt out in the open, as if the tornado had somehow gotten into the basement.

Small items blasted across the floor and battered me. I opened my eyes and saw one of Ronnie’s work boots thud against my side. Papers whipped around me, bending over my arms. A wall calendar screamed past. An empty milk crate, which had spilled its contents, tumbled up against my shins. An ashtray knocked me in the back of the head, making me cry out and inch my fingers over to where it had hit, feeling the warmth and wetness I was sure was blood. The pool table spun half a circle and came to rest again.

It felt like a never-ending stream of chaos. Like my whole world was being shaken and tossed and torn apart, and like it would never stop. Like I would be stuck in this terror forever.

I was confused, and my arms, legs, back, and head stung. I coiled into myself, gripping my head and crying and crying, half-sobbing, half-shrieking. I don’t know how long I stayed that way before I realized it was over.

When I opened my eyes, at first I stayed in my safety position. I could hear rain now, pelting the ground, only the ground seemed very close. It was still dark, still windy, but had already lightened up some since the tornado had passed.

At last, I forced myself to let go of my head and felt around for my cell phone. It was lodged between my backpack and my stomach and I pulled it out, my fingers white and shaky as I clung to it. I tried to call Mom.

No connection.

I tried Ronnie.

Same.

911.

Nothing.

I tried Jane. Dani. Everyone I could think of.

I was getting no bars. No cell service.

I lay there for a few more minutes, trying to catch my
breath and quell my panicked sobbing. My arms and legs felt tingly from adrenaline and fear. I listened. I could hear talking and loud cries and car alarms bleating. A stuck police siren. A plea for help. And off in the distance, just maybe, the growling chug of the funnel cloud moving on.

Growing up, we were taught over and over again what steps to take in case of an approaching tornado. Listen for sirens, go to your basement or cellar, or a closet in the center of your house, duck and cover, wait it out. We had drills twice a year, every year, in school. We talked about it in class. We talked about it at home. The newscasters reminded us. We went to the basement. We practiced, practiced, practiced.

But we’d never—not once—discussed what to do
after
.

I think we never thought there would be an after like this one.

It seemed like forever before the rain and wind stopped. It was still gray around me, but the sky had lightened up enough that I could see fine without the flashlight, which I’d dropped in my scramble to the pool table.

Kolby. I would go get Kolby. See if he could call my mom from his phone. Slowly, I uncurled myself and, after a moment of hesitation, slid out from under the table and sat up.

At the opposite end of the basement, where Ronnie’s workbench normally sat, there was no ceiling. The floor I had been standing on while rummaging for a flashlight just fifteen minutes before was now buried in a dusty pile of rubble—what used to be our kitchen, except the table was gone and the walls were gone and the plates had all fallen out of their cabinets,
which were also gone, and now lay in a heap on the concrete basement floor.

What was worse—I could see sky where the kitchen used to be. Wires and broken pipes jutted out here and there. Water gushed from somewhere.

“Oh my God,” I said, pulling myself up to standing, unsure whether my wobbly legs would keep me that way. “Oh my God.”

I took a few steps toward the rubble. The closer I got, the more sky I could see. The kitchen walls, they were gone. Completely and totally gone.

I could have walked right up the rubble pile to the outside if I’d wanted to, but the sight of my broken kitchen was so foreign, the bare and jutting wires so frightening, I couldn’t make myself approach it. The basement stairs were still standing, and for some reason walking up them and through the basement door into the house seemed like the right thing to do, so I made my way over to them, a part of me hoping that maybe if I went up the stairs, the rest of the house wouldn’t be as bad as the kitchen looked.

The couch had been pulled to the rubble and turned up on its side. There were clothes strewn everywhere.

I glanced down at my hands, my fingers streaked with dried blood, my right hand wrapped around my useless cell phone. I stuffed the phone into my pocket and reached around to the back of my head again. It was sticky and my hair felt kind of matted, but it didn’t really hurt or anything, and it wasn’t gushing blood, so I ignored it, trying to keep things
in perspective. It was just a cut. It could wait until Mom got home. Everything would be fine once she got here.

I crept forward, edging around things that didn’t belong there. A hunk of Venetian blinds. A DVD. A carpet of wet papers. A dog leash. A swing from Kolby’s little sister’s swing set, the ends of the chain twisted and broken, as if chewed up by a giant monster.

Slowly I crept up the stairs and pushed on the door, which would only open a little before it was stopped by something wedged against it. I tried leaning into the door and pushing harder, but it wouldn’t budge, so I sucked in my stomach and squeezed through the opening.

I stepped into the room, my dried-bloody hand flying up to my mouth. Had I not known I was standing in my living room, I never would have guessed this was my house. The roof was completely missing. The whole thing. No holes or tears—gone. Some of the outside walls were also missing, and the remaining walls were in perilously bad condition. One was leaning outward, the window blown and the frame hanging by a corner. Farther away, where the living room and the kitchen normally met, the house just… ended. I knew, from what I’d seen downstairs, that much of it had toppled in on itself. But I hadn’t been prepared for how gone it was. Even the stove was missing. Not moved, but completely absent. Nowhere in sight.

I couldn’t make it to my room. I couldn’t even really tell where my room was. And for a few minutes I stood dumbly in the basement doorway, my hand over my mouth, my eyes wide, my heart beating so fast I thought I might throw up, trying to
take everything in. I’d seen photos of houses destroyed by tornadoes before, but never had I seen anything like it in real life. The destruction was complete, and terrible.

Outside. I needed to go outside and see if anyone else’s house had gotten hit. I needed to find help. To find Mom. To find someone who could take me to her, so I could break it to her how bad the house was damaged, and let her know I was okay.

I made my way to the front door, which was, oddly, still there, still on its hinges, though it was hanging on to a partial wall.

It took me several minutes of clawing at scraps of wood and climbing over debris to get to the door, treading carefully in my bare feet, wishing I’d been wearing shoes when the tornado hit, or at least had brought a pair down to the basement with me. I cut my hand on glass twice, more blood seeping out and mixing with the dried blood and grime already there. I wiped it on my jeans and kept going, trying to force down the frantic feeling welling inside me as I heard more crying and voices outside.

As I took a final step toward the door, my foot sank into something soft and cold. It was Marin’s purse, the one Mom had made her leave at home. I pulled it out of the rubble, then held it up and studied it. Other than being dirty and dusty and a little bit wet, it looked fine. I set it on top of a bent kitchen chair next to me for safekeeping—Marin would want her purse when she got back.

Finally, I wrenched the door open and immediately went
breathless, as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. I saw little lights dance before my eyes, and my lips felt tingly. For a shaky moment I thought I might pass out.

It hadn’t been just our house.

It had been everyone’s houses.

There was no street. Just piles upon piles of scraps and glass and broken furniture and wood and trash. I leaned back against the remaining wall of my house, but it groaned under my weight and I stood up again, quickly. I couldn’t get my breath.

I wanted my mom. Or Ronnie. Somebody to hold me up.

Several neighbors were standing in the street, in various poses of upset. Mr. Klingbeil stood with his hands on his hips, staring at what used to be his house and shaking his head. Mrs. Fay was locked in an embrace with Mrs. Chamberlain. They were both weeping loudly. Some of the little kids were crouching in the street, their faces looking curious and half-excited as they picked up branches and toys and bricks, but also very somber, like even they understood that this was bad, bad, bad. A couple of people were bent at the waist, mucking through the rubble of their houses, picking up little busted pieces of this and that and discarding them again.

I could see movement where our road normally connected with Church Street. A trickle of people were trudging along, looking shocked and lost. Off in the distance I could hear the wailing of sirens—emergency vehicles—but nothing nearby. How could they get to us, I wondered. There was no street to drive on. It was impossible to find it under all the rubble.

One man fell and a woman near him dropped to his side, pushing on his shoulder and yelling out, “Help! Anyone! Please!” but the people kept walking around them, looking dazed and wounded. Finally, a man stopped and after a few minutes helped her get the fallen man to his feet. Together, they trudged along, the man between them, his arms slung around their necks.

“Holy shit,” I heard. Kolby was pulling himself through his basement window, which appeared to be the only opening to the basement at all. Unlike my house, which still had that one wall standing, Kolby’s house had been completely razed to the ground. “Holy shit!” And then he yelled it. “Holy shit!” His little sister scrambled out the window behind him, silently taking in the scene as I’d done, her feet bare, her legs and feet smudged with dirt.

“You okay, Jersey?” he shouted, and I could feel my head nodding, but I still wasn’t entirely sure I wasn’t going to pass out, so the movement felt very slow and fluid.

He turned and dropped to his knees, sticking his head back through the basement window, and then came out again, holding his mom under her arms and tugging her. She tumbled outside and sat where she landed, her hands going to her cheeks. “Oh, dear Lord,” I heard her say, and then she began praying. “Thank you, Jesus, for keeping us alive. Thank you, dear Jesus, for saving us.”

Kolby started in my direction. “You should get away from that wall,” he said, climbing across boards to get to me. He stepped on a baby rattle, cracking it. I stared at it, wondering
where it might have come from and what had happened to the baby it belonged to. “Jersey? Hey, Jersey? You okay?”

I nodded again, but the image of a baby flying through the air, caught in the eye of a monster tornado, was about all I could take, and I felt myself starting to go down.

“Whoa! Whoa!” Kolby said, and he lunged up to the porch to grab my shoulders and keep me upright. “Any help over here?” he called out.

“I’m okay,” I mumbled. “I just need to sit down.”

“You’re bleeding,” he said, maneuvering so he was next to me, his arm around both of my shoulders. He walked me off the porch and toward where our front yard used to be. Kolby and I had played more games of Wiffle ball on that front yard than I could count. Now that seemed like forever ago.

“I’m okay,” I mumbled again, but when Kolby eased me toward a cinder block on the ground, I was glad to be sitting.

“You’re bleeding,” he repeated. “Where are you hurt?”

I reached up to the back of my head again. It seemed dry now. “An ashtray hit me,” I said. “But I think it’s just a cut.”

I heard his mother calling out to someone else, asking if anyone was hurt. Kolby squatted in front of me so that his face was only inches from mine. “Where is everybody?” he asked, and when I didn’t answer, he said, “Your mom and Ronnie? Marin?”

I closed my eyes. It was easier to concentrate when I wasn’t looking at the wasted neighborhood. “Mom and Marin are at dance class. I don’t know where Ronnie is. I don’t know if he was on his way home from work or…” I trailed off, watched
as Mr. Fay pointed out to Mrs. Fay a two-by-four that had been driven into the side of their house and was sticking out like a dart. Mrs. Fay snapped a photo of it with her phone. “The whole street is gone.”

He stood up and peered down toward Church Street, with its trickle of refugees heading away from the destruction.

“I know,” he said. “It’s just… holy cow.”

“How far do you think it went?” I asked.

He shook his head but didn’t answer.

“Kolby? How far do you think it went?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his voice sounding flat and croaky. “Looks like far.”

“Do you think…?” I started, but I trailed off, afraid to finish my question, afraid that the answer would be no.

Do you think Mom will be able to get to me?