Torn Away (5 page)

And before I could say anything in protest, he loped off toward Mrs. Donnelly’s cellar.

Part of me was definitely ready to do this. To go out and find my mom and Marin and Ronnie. If they couldn’t get to me, I’d get to them.

But part of me was scared.

What if I didn’t find them?

What if they weren’t there to be found?

More and more vehicles were creeping down Church Street by the time we got to it, some of them stopping to pick up people who were still walking toward town, still hoping to find help. Some passengers offered bottles of water and first-aid kits. Others rolled by with cameras, taking photos and gabbing about the devastation as if it were there for their entertainment.

By comparison, all the people who were walking looked filthy and grim. Some wore stony, distant expressions, as if they had no idea where they were or where they were going. Some were carrying children. Some were covered in dried blood. Some were telling stories, and all of the stories were similar—the house fell apart, the wind tugged at us, we got hit with something, our houses are gone, our cars are gone, our streets are gone, our lives, as we knew them, are gone.

“About a half mile that direction will get you out of the
storm’s path,” one woman told Kolby, pointing to the east. “It ran north and south, so if you go east, before long you’ll come to regular pavement.”

So we walked east on Kentucky, taking in the devastation there as we headed toward normalcy.

“You smell that?” Kolby said, wrinkling his nose. “Stinks.”

I thought about the hamburger I’d crumbled up in the skillet right before the storm hit. Who knew where it had been flung, but wherever it was, it was rotting in the sun now, along with dinners and the refrigerator guts of hundreds of other houses.

“Smells like the washing machine when I forget to take the wet clothes out,” I said.

“It’s only gonna get worse, you know,” he said. “That smell. All that wet stuff and the heat.”

“Food rotting,” I added.

“And people,” Kolby said, and he said it so matter-of-factly, I stopped walking and stared at him.

“What?” he asked, turning to face me and shrugging. “There are dead people under some of this stuff. And dead animals, too. It’s reality.”

I started walking again. “Yeah, but you don’t have to say it like that. Like it’s no big deal.”

“I don’t like it, either,” he mumbled, following me.

We came up over a hill and could see where the destruction stopped, not too many yards ahead of us. It was strange, seeing how the houses went from totally razed to beat up and broken to lightly damaged to completely fine. Literally, where
one house was gone, the neighbor three houses down would only need to replace some shingles.

It was at that end of the street where most of the people were congregating. Chain saws buzzed and whole crowds sifted through rubble, people calling out to one another, offering help and drinks, the effort much more concerted than on our street. Someone had set up a few tents and folding tables covered with food and drinks and tools and supplies. Two of the tents shaded an assortment of lawn chairs, and some women sat there with babies. Little kids squatted on the ground and munched on grapes, watching as Kolby and I scuffed by.

“You all right?” a woman hollered to us from one of the chairs. “You need help?”

“We’re fine,” I yelled back, smiling as if we were simply out on a midday stroll.

“You need something to eat?” she called. “There’s plenty. None of us has power, so we’ve got to eat it while it’s still good.”

My stomach growled, and Kolby and I looked at each other. We diverted to the tent, where I immediately grabbed a banana and Kolby palmed a sandwich, taking a huge bite out of it and closing his eyes while he chewed.

“You’re hurt,” the woman said, softer now as she approached us. “We’ve got bandages. Is it bad?”

“It’s okay,” Kolby said, but I overrode him.

“It’s pretty bad. How big are your bandages?”

The woman rifled through the first-aid kits, then disappeared into her house. Kolby and I snacked while we waited,
shoving crackers and cheese cubes into our mouths greedily. She came back out with a roll of gauze and some tape.

“It’s kind of old, but it’s going to be better than that,” she said, handing me the gauze.

We made our way over to the chairs and Kolby peeled off the bandanna and clothesline from his arm. I winced when I looked at the cut, the skin around the edges swollen and angry red.

“You’re gonna want to keep that clean,” the woman said, making a pained face. “It looks pretty bad. What did you cut it on?”

“Glass,” Kolby answered.

“Good, at least it wasn’t rusted metal. You’re probably gonna need a tetanus shot anyway. Although I don’t know where you’d go to get one right now,” she said. “I suppose the Elizabeth Clinic was spared yesterday, but it’s probably packed. And nobody has power.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Kolby said as I wrapped the gauze around his arm and secured it with a strip of tape. “How far did the tornado go, do you know?” he asked.

“My husband drove around this morning,” the woman said. “About seven miles or so. Hit some of the schools, the library, the hospital, the police station, fire station. Hit everything. You two need a ride somewhere? I’m sure Jerry’ll take you.”

“We’re going to Janice’s Dance Studio,” I said. “That’s where my mom was. She hasn’t come home yet, and I’m trying to find her.”

The woman’s face paled. “On Sixth?” I nodded. “Oh, honey, he won’t be able to get you in there. Sixth got hit bad.”

“Oh. Okay,” I said, trying to ignore the lump that had suddenly formed in my throat. “We’ll walk.”

The woman offered a smile that didn’t quite hold up the corners of her mouth. “I hear they’re setting up tents at some of the churches,” she said. She looked at Kolby and lowered her voice, as if I weren’t standing right there. “They’ll be starting to compile lists. There’s a Lutheran church right around the corner on Munsee Avenue.”

Kolby nodded and grabbed my elbow, pulling me back into the street.

“What kinds of lists?” I asked when we got a little way down the road.

He took a long time to answer. “Of missing people,” he finally said. “And… you know…”

My heart went cold. “I know what?”

He stopped, still holding my elbow, his knuckles grazing my side. Ordinarily, I would be mortified at a boy touching my side, afraid that he’d feel the wobbly skin there. But I was too intent on hearing him say it aloud—that they would be compiling lists of the missing and the dead—to worry about something so stupid as whether or not I was stick-skinny. “Come on, Jersey, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ll go to Janice’s and see what’s up before we worry about what kind of lists they’ve got at the churches. Just because she said it doesn’t make it true.”

When we turned onto Sixth Street, we navigated in the
direction we’d come from, making our way back into the heart of the destruction. Under normal circumstances, I knew this part of town like the back of my hand, but the farther west we went, the harder it was to recognize anything. The woman had been right—Sixth Street had been hit bad, most of the buildings ripped right off their foundations, no leaning walls here. There were no signs, no street markers, no landmarks at all. Other than a handful of people determinedly digging through debris where Fenderman’s Grocery used to be, there weren’t even any people.

“I think it was here,” I said, stopping and facing a mostly bare rectangle of concrete. Around the concrete was mud; even the grass had been stripped. It was almost as if the tornado had tried to dig down into the ground with its twisting fingers and scoop Janice’s off the earth.

Kolby walked over to the concrete and bent to pick up something. It was a small ballet shoe. Too small to have been Marin’s, but still the sight of it brought tears to my eyes.

“They aren’t here,” I said. Kolby dropped the shoe. I tried to remember where the cloak closet was—it had been a while since I’d come to the studio with Mom and Marin, and I was turned around by everything being gone. I stumbled across the concrete to the far corner. Where walls had once been anchored into the floor, now just a few splintered boards stuck up from the ground. There were a couple of empty gym bags caught on a ripped-off piece of stud, but otherwise there was nothing.

“They aren’t here,” I repeated.

“I know,” Kolby said. “Sorry.”

I sank to the ground on my knees. When I’d called Mom, had she been right here? Had this been where she’d been shouting to get down, where she’d been ordering me to the basement, where she’d been unable to hear me? I pressed my palms onto the gritty floor. A handprint stamped itself into the drying grime.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said, but Kolby didn’t answer, which made me unsure whether I’d said it out loud. “Kolby, what do I do?”

Kolby used his foot to scrape some shattered glass out of the way, then came over to where I knelt on the ground. “I don’t know,” he said.

I turned my eyes up to him. “What if they’re dead?” I asked. “What if they all died?” The question felt like a punch to my stomach.

Kolby knelt next to me. He didn’t try to tell me they weren’t dead. I guessed that was because he knew this looked as bad as I thought it did. They might be dead, or they might be injured or in comas or God knew what else. Telling me they were anything other than that would be a lie, and we both knew it. If they were alive and fine, they would have come home. Mom would have come for me.

The food I’d wolfed down in the tents roiled in my stomach as Kolby’s silence sank in. I scrambled clumsily up to my feet and thunked as far away from him as I could before bending at the waist and vomiting on a bare spot of dirt. I heard shuffling sounds as he stood up. “I’m sorry,” I said between retches. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said, and when I finished and came back to him, he clumsily patted my back between my shoulder blades. “Let’s go to the church,” he said. “Maybe they’ll know something.”

We scuffed away from Janice’s and toward the Lutheran church. The woman we’d talked to was right—they had set up a tent full of supplies. Kolby and I grabbed water bottles from a bucket of ice as soon as we reached the tent. I opened mine and began sipping it while Kolby downed his. The tent was stuffed with people who looked just as homeless and dazed as we were.

“Can I help you?” a woman in sandals, a tan vest, and a safari hat said, hurrying to greet us.

“Do you have lists?” I blurted out, getting to the worst before I tried to talk myself out of wanting to know.

“What kind of lists are you looking for, honey?” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder and pulling me toward a table, where she eased me into a folding chair.

“I can’t find my mom or my sister,” I said. “They were at Janice’s Dance Studio?” The last came out as a question, as if part of me was hoping that the woman would tell me I was wrong—that my mom and sister had never been at the studio, that they’d ridden out the storm safe and sound in someone’s basement instead.

The woman’s face fell a little, but she recovered very quickly. She leaned to the side and picked up a clipboard. “You want to add them to the list of those who are missing?” she asked.

“Is there… another list…?” I asked. “Of people who didn’t make it through?”

She shook her head. “It’s too early, and I’m afraid we haven’t been getting many updates about that,” she said. “The power’s out all over Elizabeth, which is making communication a challenge. But we’re compiling a list of the missing, so families who aren’t in contact with one another can at least see that someone else in the family is looking for them.”

“Is her name on there?” Kolby asked, pointing to the list. “Jersey Cameron?” He looked at me eagerly. “Maybe they’re looking for you, too.”

The woman scanned the list, running her finger down the names, her lips moving. At last she looked up and gave a rueful head shake. “No, honey, I’m sorry, it’s not. But we’ll add your mom and sister to this list—”

“And my stepdad,” I interrupted miserably. I felt my chin shake. “Everyone.”

“Okay, we’ll put their names down on the list, and that way when they get their bearings and come looking for you, they’ll know you’re fine,” she said.

I gave her my information, along with Mom’s, Ronnie’s, and Marin’s, but my voice got thick and tears welled in my eyes as I talked.

The woman put down her pen and stared at me sympathetically. “Honey, do you have somewhere to go? Someone you can try to get ahold of? We’ve got some cots we’re setting up in the sanctuary and the basement, and we can work with you to get in touch with any family you might have outside of Elizabeth. Or Child Protective Services.”

Fear wracked my body. I couldn’t go sleep on a cot in a church basement and wait for a social worker to show up and send me off to foster care. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I knew I wasn’t going to do that. I eyed Kolby, who had gone over to another table, where a woman was pouring peroxide over his cut.

“I’m staying with his family,” I said. “Until we find mine.” I tried to smile, though it felt counterfeit on my face. Kolby was going to be leaving town to stay with his aunt, he’d said. He wasn’t going to take care of me. His mom wasn’t going to take care of me. They hadn’t offered, and even if they had, I wouldn’t go. What if Mom came back after I left?

“Okay,” the woman said. “But our doors are always open. We’ve had donations of clothes coming in all morning. You might go through those boxes over there and pick out a few things. Also, feel free to take any food and supplies you may need. We expect we’ll be getting lots more donations by tomorrow. Plenty of folks have already been coming in with truckloads of stuff.”

“Thank you,” I said, but I didn’t take anything. My stomach was still sour with nerves and exhaustion, and the last thing I cared about was my clothes. I still had water in the mini-fridge in the basement. I wanted to get out of there before I ended up having to stay.

The woman who was tending to Kolby’s arm slathered some cream on it and rewrapped it, telling him about the cots and the clothes and the food as well.

“You going to stay?” he asked when we were alone again.

“No. I’m going back. I don’t want them to freak out if they somehow make it home and I’m gone.”

My words felt hollow to me. Like something I didn’t really believe in.

But Kolby must have known how much I needed to say them. He didn’t question me, just started walking back the way we had come.