Torn Away

CHAPTER TWO

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.

CHAPTER THREE

"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.