Torn Away (7 page)

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. Doppelgängers. 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.”