“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 - EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED
TORNADO WARNING
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE GOODLAND KS
517 AM MDT MON JUL 17 2006
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN GOODLAND HAS ISSUED A
* TORNADO WARNING FOR...
NORTH CENTRAL SHERIDAN COUNTY IN NORTHWEST KANSAS...
* UNTIL 630 AM MDT
* AT 510 AM MDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR WAS TRACKING A TORNADO 15 MILES NORTHWEST OF HOXIE...OR ABOUT 8 MILES WEST OF SELDEN...MOVING EAST AT 15 MPH.
* THE TORNADO WILL BE NEAR...
SELDEN AROUND 610 AM MDT...
IF YOU ARE AT HOME...SEEK SHELTER IN A BASEMENT IF POSSIBLE. OTHERWISE...GO TO A SMALL INTERIOR ROOM ON THE LOWEST FLOOR
. AVOID WINDOWS AND PROTECT YOURSELF FROM FLYING DEBRIS.
IF IN MOBILE HOMES OR VEHICLES...EVACUATE THEM AND GET INSIDE A STURDY SHELTER. IF NO SHELTER IS AVAILABLE...LIE FLAT IN THE NEAREST DITCH OR OTHER LOW SPOT AND COVER YOUR HEAD WITH YOUR HANDS.
“I have to go,” Peter said.
“Right now?”
He closed the laptop. “Right now.”
“I want to come with you.”
“This will be dangerous, Melanie.”
“I know. But I want to see it. Just let me go change into something.”
“We don’t have time.” He jumped up from the sofa and moved into the front of the RV, sat down behind the wheel, fished the keys out of his pocket. “Bring the laptop please,” he said. “You can help me track it.”
They sped through dreaming Hoxie, the wet streets of the hamlet vacated, the houses still dark. Peter ran the single traffic light at the center of town and raced north up Highway 23, pushing the Winnebago harder than he had in years, the RPMs edging into the red.
“There it is,” Peter said.
“Where?”
He pointed out the windshield. To the northwest in the strengthening light, a thunderhead towered over the plain—concentric circles of green-tinted clouds spiraling into the upper reaches of a 60,000-foot supercell out of the bottom of which a curtain of pale gray draped to the prairie floor.
“God,” he said.
“Is this a special one?”
“You never see them like this.”
“On the radar, it looks like the storm is moving just a bit more to the north.”
“Is it still on track to hit Selden?”
“I think so.”
“Then we’ll try to intercept on Highway 9.”
They entered Selden at 5:57 a.m.
Houselights shining. Families gathered on porches to stare at the sky and listen to the eerie wail of the tornado alarm that blared through town. Peter bypassed the miniscule business district and turned onto Highway 9. They screamed east for three miles, Selden shrinking in the rearview mirror, and then he eased off the highway where it intersected with a dirt road.
“Let me see the laptop.”
He studied the radar loop for thirty seconds and handed the Mac back to Melanie.
“Are we good?” she asked.
He could feel his heart pulsing against the back of his eyes. “Perfect.”
Peter drove the RV across the intersection and onto the opposite shoulder so they faced west toward Selden and the storm. He cut the engine and opened his door and stepped down. Walked twenty feet out from the Winnie, straddled a slash of faded yellow paint in the middle of the road.
Checked his watch: 6:04.
They’d pulled over at a point of prominence on the prairie, the land falling gently away in every direction, so they could see for miles. The front passenger door slammed. He glanced back, saw Melanie walking toward him in a pair of slippers and a lavender nightgown, the thin cotton flickering in the wind.
She smiled, took hold of his hand.
At their backs, the sun crept over the horizon, and when its light hit the storm, the leading shelf cloud turned dirty pink.
It sounded like Selden was getting shelled, the tornado alarm reduced to a dial tone from this distance.
Raindrops specked the pavement.
The alarm hushed.
The swarthy clouds over Selden turned black and a substation exploded in a burst of loose electricity.
Melanie’s grip tightened around Peter’s hand.
Already you could see the counterclockwise churn of debris growing more profuse with every second, and then a black column emerged from the town, carrying pieces of Selden in its swirl which curved for several thousand feet into the sky.
Melanie said, “Oh my God.”
Pellets of hail had begun to bounce off the pavement, a breathy roar becoming audible.
“Should we go?”
He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “The twister’s going to come right down this highway. Right over this spot.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
He handed her the keys to the Winnie. “Head east as fast as you can.”
“Peter—”
“Listen to me. It’s a slow-mover, and there’s a northerly component to its trajectory, so it’ll eventually veer north of the highway.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Melanie, I’ve been trying to get myself into this position for ten years. This is a once in a lifetime kind of—”
“What position? Getting yourself killed by a tornado?”
“I don’t expect you to understand, but I am asking you to please just let me have this moment. Let me do this without interference. I think about it every day. I dream about it all the time. This is what I want. This is all I want.”
“So I just step back, let you commit suicide?”
“I could’ve shot myself years ago. This isn’t about suicide, Melanie.”
“Then what’s it about?”
The twister sounded like sustained thunder, even from three miles away, the condensation funnel widening and darkening, cluttered with all it had scoured out of Selden—cars and stoves and splinters of siding and so many airborne shingles they resembled a flock of birds and God knows what else.
“You better go.”
She shook her head.
“Goddammit, you aren’t going to change—”
She framed his face with her hands. “I’m not trying to change your mind. I honest to God want to stay with you.”
“Melanie.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t you do that. We haven’t known each other long, but I get you, and I think you get me. We aren’t here to save each other, Peter. You know that. That’s not what this is about.”
He stared at her, the wind whipping her hair across her face, pea-size hail clinking on the RV. For a second he considered what it might feel like to love her, but the attendant pain and fear was cost-prohibitive.
He swiped the keys out of her hand, started running toward the RV.
“Buckle your seatbelt,” he said, cranking the engine.
Through the windshield, Selden had vanished behind a shaggy funnel a quarter-mile across.
Peter accelerated toward it, the tornado expanding until it consumed the view west.
He said, “Christ, it’s big.”
“How far?”
“About a mile I’d say.”
He drove another quarter mile and then brought the RV to a full stop in the highway.
“What are you doing?”
“Just having one last look out in the open.”
Peter left the engine running, shoved his door open against the wind, and jumped out.
He ran down the middle of the road for thirty seconds and looked up.
A wall of rotating gray.
Godlike noise.
A thousand jet engines amplified through megaphones, and already the wind slinging roadside trash across the pavement and filling the air with dust. He counted the telephone poles that ran along the highway. After fourteen, they disappeared. The fourteenth vanished, and seconds later, the top half of number thirteen snapped off and was sucked up into the vortex in a spray of blue sparks.
He sprinted back to the Winnie and climbed up into the seat. Slammed the door. Strapped himself in. Melanie’s face was white.
“You’re sure you—”
“Yes, just go.”
Peter shifted into drive, pushed the accelerator into the floorboard.
Melanie produced a deep exhalation and grabbed the edges of her seat.
By the time they’d gone the span of four telephone poles, the oncoming roar drowned out the straining engine.
Two hundred yards from the funnel, grains of dirt and sand began to patter the sides of the RV, the sky rotting into darkness.
At a hundred yards, uprooted grass streamed sideways through the sky and he could feel the north wind in the steering wheel, muscling the side of th
e Winnie which had begun to rock imperceptibly on its shocks.
He glanced at Melanie, her eyes shut, knuckles blanching.
The speedometer needle trembled at eighty-five as they entered the vortex and he thought he heard Melanie scream but it was the hysterical voice of the twister.
The RV pitched and slammed onto its right side, pavement skinning metal, debris hammering the undercarriage. Peter could feel the pressure drop in his ears and his lungs, and Melanie had her legs drawn into her chest, head buried between her knees, bracing, yellow sparks firing on the other side of her window.
In the swirling gray madness, a potted plant shot past with the velocity of a cannon ball and the walls of the RV creaked and a window exploded in back.
Then the sparks disappeared and the grinding went quiet, the sudden acceleration beyond anything Peter had experienced, pressing him into the cushion of his seat, the roar escalating to a screaming hiss, now pitch black through the windshield and nothing to see but the glow of the dash.
Lightning flashed and the view out his window made him cry.
It would have been invisible but for the lightning. The RV was upright and tilted left. At an inconceivable speed, they orbited the center of the tornado—a cylinder of still, clear air with walls of rotating clouds made brilliant by the ribbons of lightning that streaked across the funnel. Inside, smaller tornadoes were constantly forming and writhing and dying away, and he glimpsed a gray thread at the base of the funnel that he realized was Highway 9, eight hundred feet below.
Peter was still squeezing the steering wheel, holding onto some illusion of control. He let go, tucked his hands under his arms, and stared through the window. Drinking it all in. Fighting to stay with the moment, this last moment, but he kept seeing their faces—clarity where for two decades there had been only blur.
Darkness again.
By the dashboard glow, Peter saw coins rising out of the drink holders.
His stomach lifted into his throat, and he had the inescapable sense that they were plunging earthward—exhilaration and fear and unbearable weightlessness.