The Aftermath

by Matayo, Amy

  Teddy rolls his eyes. “They’re both true. I’m dating them at the same time, and I’ve got three more chicks waiting in the wings, and the new Marvel hero is giving me serious consideration. It’s exhausting to be me, what with all the making out I must do on a round-the-clock schedule. I barely have time for touring, much less writing new songs. The real question is, why do you buy that crap?”

  “To annoy you, of course.” Liam grins and tosses the magazines down. “I’m tired just thinking about it. One girl is more than enough, though I’m fully invested in the Marvel chick. Let me know how that one works out for you.”

  “You’ll be the first to know.”

  Liam’s phone rings and breaks up this three-ring circus, and he picks it up. “Good morning, baby. You having a good day so—? Wait. What? No, I hadn’t heard…” I stuff down a residual pang of jealousy as he walks down the hall and closes his bedroom door.

  “I see you’re still struggling,” Teddy says, drilling a tiny hole in my conscience.

  “Only a little,” I admit. I hate being called on my crap, but it’s also nice to be known without judgment.

  “Give it time, and it will go away.” He’s right, but I don’t respond. There’s no need. We both know I can’t wait for the day I wake up no longer pining for my brother’s fiancée. After a couple of seconds, Teddy pats the countertop and stands up. “Alright, I’m heading back to bed. I’ll see you tonight, okay?”

  I nod, distracted. “Okay.”

  He takes a few steps, then doubles back for the magazines and swipes them off the counter. “I guess I should catch up on my fake love life,” he says with a smile.

  I laugh, though it fades into melancholy as Liam wanders back in with a look on his face. I’ve seen that look before, but it’s been a while. It’s like an ache before the flu sets in. Worried, but not feeling quite entitled to the emotion.

  “Did you hear the news?”

  “About Teddy’s love life? A few dozen times too many, I’m afraid.” I laugh and so does Teddy, but Liam’s eyebrows furrow.

  “No, about Springfield, Missouri. They had a massive tornado a couple hours ago. They’re speculating over a hundred people are dead, maybe more. Supposedly it’s worse than Joplin.”

  My stomach sinks into my shoes. Joplin was catastrophic. All these years later, and I’m not sure that town ever fully recovered. Yet this one is worse? That’s hard to imagine, but I do, and what my mind conjures up leaves me unsettled, worried, and sick. It’s another example of how life can change on a dime even when you’d rather feel penniless.

  A hundred people dead. What must that town look like?

  “Man, Missouri is not a place I’d want to live,” Teddy quips, rolling the magazines in a tube inside his fists.

  “Nor me, though sometimes Tennessee can be just as bad,” Liam says. He’s right because he knows firsthand. We both know.

  “What are we going to do?” I ask, more to myself than anyone else.

  Teddy sighs, long and slow. “Well, I’m going to take a nap.”

  Liam shrugs. “And I’ve got to call Dillon back. Pizza tonight, don’t forget.”

  I scratch my eyebrow, wishing I had it in me to be so flippant and unconcerned. “You’re not an athlete like your brother, and you don’t have his looks. And with that bleeding heart of yours, you’re gonna have to prove yourself another way. Like, be a hero or become a millionaire. And snagging a hot wife wouldn’t hurt.” My dad’s oft-spoken words rush back like they always do, not at all concerned that I resent them like a leech already half-filled with my blood. I’ve spent my life proving myself. I’ve chased storms, chased heroics, chased women, chased anything that takes those words away. In all that time, I have managed to make a few lives better, but the girl is still elusive. Maybe someday, though it’s looking less and less likely.

  I’ll settle for helping others out.

  I watch as they both leave the room, then pick up my coffee and turn toward the window, staring at the iron railing that encircles the balcony. A robin is perched on one corner, the occasional burst of music bursting from his bill. Another bird lands at the other end and hops a bit closer. They’re together, those birds, in the way nature pairs living creatures off and forms a family. I’ve never been jealous of birds before, but here we are.

  Maybe it’s the sound of Liam’s voice drifting down the hallway as he talks in low tones to Dillon once again. Maybe it’s the way Teddy is adored by so many…the number of women so vast the tabloids can’t agree on who he should date next.

  Either way, everyone has a person. Everyone has a place to belong.

  “You’re gonna have to prove yourself…”

  I watch the birds and slowly sip my coffee.

  CHAPTER 3

  Riley Mae

  “Please be careful with her,” I plead with the ambulance driver. “She’s all I have.” A new stream of tears runs down both cheeks. Every time I think I have a handle on my emotions, I start crying again. My grandmother slipped into unconsciousness on the bakery floor while we waited for the paramedics. I spent what felt like an eternity trying to wake her to no avail. She is literally everything to me, has been for the past twenty years. If I were to lose her now…

  We take a sharp left, and my stomach lurches. The whole drive has been this way as the ambulance weaves in and out, around obstacles. I had only a moment to take in my surroundings when we climbed inside the vehicle, but what I saw will stay with me forever.

  The building diagonal from me had crumbled.

  Bodies lined the roadways, some moving but others eerily still.

  Rubble filled so much of the roads that I still can’t figure out how we drove away.

  Broken glass everywhere.

  But the screams. They impacted me the most. Cries of anguish will infiltrate my sleep; of that, I am certain.

  “We’ll get her there in one piece. I can promise you that,” a female paramedic says to me. I glance up at her, but only for a second. I’m too focused on my grandmother’s breathing to spend time on much else. The rise and fall of her chest is the only thing keeping me sane, and I’m counting every breath like one might whisper a prayer. One: please breathe again. Two: there it is, now keep going. Three: don’t give up, we’re almost there. Four: God, please don’t let her die.

  Five.

  Six.

  Eleven.

  The ambulance comes to a stop, and I’m thrust out of my counting when the back doors quickly open. Activity comes at me faster than I can keep up. Medical personnel meet us as my grandmother is lowered and placed on a gurney. Paramedics recite her vitals, her name and age, the severity of her wounds. My name is thrown around somewhere, but I’m stuck on the words: blood pressure dropping. Before I have a chance to climb out of the ambulance, they take off with her and disappear through two double doors. I hop down and run to catch up, but someone stops me as I enter the hospital.

  “You need to wait in the waiting room with all the other family members.”

  I open my mouth to say that I’m her only family member, but then look up to see that she means everyone milling in the lobby. The hospital is filled to capacity; this can’t be safe. People are stacked everywhere, and the noise level is so high I want to scream at everyone to shut up. I can’t hear. My thoughts jumble together like tangled fishing line left at the bottom of a backpack. Blood pressure dropping. Blood pressure dropping. Everything fades like I’m hearing it underwater. I know what fainting feels like, and I’m dangerously close. I look around for a seat, but there isn’t one. My upper lip is sweating, and my skin feels clammy, so I take three steps and sink to the floor. I feel a wall at my back, so I should be safe here. I drop my head to my knees and continue counting.

  Twelve. Don’t faint, don’t faint, don’t faint.

  Thirteen. Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die.

  Fourteen. How did any of this happen?

  When I reach twenty-five, I feel a bit better and slowly raise my head. It’s
then that I spot the television across from me. Images of the devastation fill the screen as a newscaster describes what he sees from the air. Whatever I thought I saw next to the bakery when we climbed into the ambulance, the hit our entire town has taken is so much worse. An elementary school is almost entirely gone. Horses lie dead in fields. People are lifeless on sidewalks. The mall has a gaping hole running through the middle of it. Cars are flipped upside down. One is stuck in a tree. Parking lots are jumbled and stacked. The interstate is blocked by upturned vehicles and a crack that split one side of the road in half. Even this hospital was hit, and all at once, I know why it’s so crowded. They’ve had to shut down an entire wing and are now working to relocate patients and reroute family members. They’re reporting that one patient died from the storm. There’s no way to know if the information is true, but from the look of things, I don’t doubt it.

  More people walk in and I press myself a little tighter to the wall to make room.

  I stare at the television a bit longer, but information comes at me so fast it becomes hard to hear or comprehend. I glance at the double doors that my grandmother disappeared behind, but no one comes back through them.

  I drop my head to my knees again and resume my count, a few words from the newscaster manage to infiltrate my headspace.

  Twenty-six. Dozens presumed dead.

  Twenty-seven. Will take years to recover.

  Twenty-eight. Worse than Joplin.

  At that, a chill runs down my spine. Worse than Joplin? But Joplin was catastrophic. What does that make us?

  Twenty-nine. Worst tornado on record.

  Unable to take any more, I cover my ears and continue to count, turning my thoughts back to my grandmother.

  When I reach ninety-five, I close my eyes and drift into oblivion.

  CHAPTER 4

  Chad

  The news is devastating and sets me back fifteen years. Houses obliterated into nothing but broken bricks, upturned bathtubs, torn curtains, and splintered wood siding. Photographs ripped into shredded memories and piles of ash. Pipes busted and spraying like sprinklers set randomly out to entertain children on a sweltering summer day.

  Neighborhoods flattened.

  Scenery smashed.

  Businesses destroyed.

  Hundreds suddenly homeless.

  Dozens dead.

  Streets filled with the injured, broken, and lost, each one of them shell-shocked from the aftermath…wondering what comes next. Where do they go? What do they eat? What happened to their clothes?

  What happened to the neighbor boy standing on our front porch wearing a tee shirt and nothing else? Crying, wailing, begging for help, his screams rising over the tornado sirens. Me opening the front door a crack before my father slammed it shut with a meaty palm, his angry face an inch from my terrified one. It was six a.m. The sun wasn’t even up. My father was an isolationist, suspicious of everyone. Especially the neighbor. The man next door accidentally sideswiped my dad’s ’62 Chevy after the family moved in. Newly painted and restored, the car sat there with a dent in its side for weeks until insurance agreed to cover repairs. That didn’t assuage my father’s anger; he never forgave the man for it.

  “We need to help him!” I pleaded, searching my father’s eyes.

  “If you open that door, you’ll live to regret it, if you even live at all. That kid is probably a trap. Happens all the time. We go out there to pick him up, and we’ll likely get shot by his dad or some crazy person waiting around the side of the house. Do you want to get shot? You willing to risk that?” My father was a paranoid end-of-days enthusiast who believed in stockpiling supplies and weapons just in case. Just in case what? None of his weird predictions had ever come true, but you couldn’t convince him to stop preparing. We had more canned beans and boxes of bullets in our basement than one family could ever use, untouched and dust-covered from his Y2K panic. Most likely expired, but he still wouldn’t throw them away.

  “He can’t just stand there, crying by himself. It’s morning. He’s probably scared and hungry.”

  “He can, and he will.”

  And he did. For over an hour while I sat on the other side of the door, my arms wrapped around my knees, and my head resting against the wall. Listening to a kid cry helplessly just because your father hates his father is its own kind of torture. It managed to rip a hole through my insides in places the tornado hadn’t touched, and I hated myself for caving to my father’s demands. What kind of guy listens to a child cry without lifting a finger to help? Eventually, the kid drifted off to sleep while lying there; his cries fading to whimpers until there was nothing at all. I fell asleep against the front door listening to him, and when I woke up, the kid was gone. I have nightmares that he wandered off alone and died somewhere; I watched the news religiously for weeks hoping for some sort of word. None ever came, but I’ve never forgotten that kid or the sound of his helpless cries.

  Liam slept through the whole thing. My mother sat on the sofa near the window, craning her neck to check on the boy when my father wasn’t looking, but she never argued with him. She knew a fight wasn’t worth the wasted words when she wouldn’t win in the end. Maybe it made her weak. I choose to believe it made her a survivor. Some things you live with because you have no other choice.

  My father was crazy. Even worse, he was selfish. Sometimes the line between both is jagged and blurred like rain-soaked chalk marks. I knew it. My mom knew it. Liam did too. We spent most of our growing up years trying to keep anyone else from finding out, though I think a few people suspected. You can’t buy crates of canned food and ammunition without raising a few eyebrows, even back then.

  It all comes back while I watch the latest news footage. And worst of all, for me, is the lone house standing in the middle of everything. Untouched and unharmed as though anointed—the prepared, the smarter, the proverbial living among the dead. “We’re special. We get to stay to remind our neighbors that they should have listened to us.”

  That was what we lived with, and no one—I mean not a single person—appreciated his self-righteous attitude. Least of all, me.

  Fifteen years might have passed, but the guilt still stays. Why was my family spared all those years ago? Why my house? Why our memories? Back then, our neighbors were both awed and frightened, hopeful and begging. But instead of opening our doors and ushering people inside…

  My father cruelly shut them out.

  He kept us in—the chosen, the gifted, the ones who needed to stay far away from the less fortunate lest all that bad luck and obvious sin rub off on us. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. It’s what keeps me glued to my laptop, beckons me back online, fills me with a hunger for news reports and a way to help. I couldn’t do much at sixteen, but I can sure do something now. It’s the reason I’ve become somewhat of a storm chaser; I don’t run into them as they happen, I run into the fallout after it recedes.

  “Look, there’s the miracle boy. What makes you think you don’t deserve to live like this?”

  I can still hear the taunts from classmates. Still feel the weight of guilt on my shoulders, the burden of shame from something I couldn’t control. It came heavy and often, resulting in me looking for ways to do penance, and I’m not even Catholic. All these years later, and the compulsion is still there. I like to think it’s rooted in my being deeply compassionate and giving of my time; in reality, I’m just trying to make up for a past that treated me too well in some ways and terrible in others.

  Our town eventually rebuilt.

  It never came that easy for me.

  “When are you heading out?” Liam drags his car keys off the counter and shoves them into his front pocket.

  “What?”

  He nods at my computer. “When are you leaving? We both know you’re going to Springfield, so there’s no use in pretending, or me trying to talk you out of it. Even Dillon knows this is your shtick.”

  I glare at my brother. I don’t have a shtick. Besi
des, I never asked what Dillion thinks of me, and why would I even care? The fact that my pulse tripped at the sound of her name was merely a coincidence.

  “What did you tell her?”

  He shoves his wallet in his back pocket. “We were riding out a bad storm on the island, so I told her about the tornado to help calm her down. I wanted her to know I had survived that sort of thing before. I told her you’re a bit of a Good Samaritan, heading out to help when things like this happen. She thought it was cool.”

  I straighten in my seat, fighting a smile. Dillion thinks I’m cool, not that it matters. “She did?”

  “Yes Romeo, but don’t be getting any ideas. Now when are you heading out?”

  I turn back to my laptop. “Tomorrow morning. My flight takes off at seven.”

  “Work or volunteer this time?”

  “A bit of both. My boss booked the flight and wants me to help file claims. So many things were destroyed. An entire wing of the hospital was flattened. Did you know that?”

  I glance at my brother, and he nods. “I heard. Still can’t figure how they managed to get everyone out in time.” Liam stares at the screen for a few long moments, taking it all in. The scene isn’t hard to imagine considering we’ve lived through something just like it before. But the fact that we were spared never bothered Liam in the way it affected me. He’s better at letting things roll off, always has been.

  “I hate the sight of that one house in the middle of everything, though.” He says this as an afterthought, then blinks, seeming to snap out of a far-away memory. Maybe we’re not that different after all. “It makes me think of that kid…” I freeze, wanting him to say more and not wanting it at the same time. We haven’t talked about it since that day over fifteen years ago. To my disappointment and relief, he glosses over it. “Okay, I’ve got to run. If I don’t see you before you leave, be careful and don’t do anything stupid. You can help, but no getting hurt.” He points a finger at me like I’m the younger brother and not the other way around. “Also, if you need help or have any legal questions, call me. I promise to answer.”