Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  I walk through the field into the apartment complex and head to Donny and Matt’s apartment. I haven’t seen them since Matt played bartender with my mother’s liquor bottles three months ago and I ended up in the hospital, but I’m hoping they’ll let me stay with them for a night or two. It feels strange to be so near my mother and hiding at the same time.

  Outside Donny and Matt’s building I hear the vague bass of music. Their door is slightly open, so I walk in. They’re having a party—people parked everywhere under a thick haze of smoke. Black Sabbath pounds the room: Happiness I cannot feel, and love to me is so unreal. I see Matt rolling a joint at the dining room table and am relieved. “Hey, Matt!” I yell over the music. He stares back at me flatly. His older brother, Donny, walks over. “Hi, Donny!” I wave. But he isn’t smiling. He takes another step toward me, and I step back instinctively.

  “You need to get out of here,” he says.

  My face tingles hot. I’m not sure I’ve heard him right, so I stand there trying to understand. Someone turns the music down.

  He takes another step toward me. “Well, what are you waiting for? I said get the fuck out of here.” A spray of his spit lands on my face.

  The party falls to a hush, and everyone is watching. My throat burns. “I don’t understand.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. You’re a runaway and a slut, and I don’t want you around here.”

  Someone laughs. I feel gutted. I’m running out the door.

  Outside I sit at the top of the long stairway across the street from my mother’s apartment building. A soft honeyed glow pours from her windows. Against the steps, a few leaves stir in the breeze. Above me, stars turn on in their big blue-black bowl. I notice that I’m shaking.

  From the corner of my eye I catch my mother move quickly past a window, and it feels at once as if something has moved across the span of my chest. I know the distinct bounce of her gait, like the beat of a familiar song. I used to listen for it at night, always wondering if she might come into our room. I spent a lot of time listening for her, sometimes after school, when I was locked out and I’d press my ear to the door. By then I’d already knocked and knocked, pressed my mouth against the door and called her name, but sometimes she forgot I was coming home. I always worried about her—was she asleep? In the bath? Breathing?—because I sensed her fragility, knew that she was stitched together with the weakest thread. But sometimes when she laughed, she invited me in, and I laughed, too, and in those moments I could almost touch her.

  I spent years roaming the hills and fields and woods of this apartment complex. I knew where to find flint in the woods; I knew the best doors to knock on for candy at Halloween; I knew the distinct pitch of each slope. But now this place is my past, and I feel like a ghost coming back to haunt it.

  At the end of eighth grade, my school guidance counselor told me I could be anything I wanted to be. By then I’d been running away for most of the year, and when I wasn’t running, I was skipping school. “I’ve seen your test scores, Rita,” he said, “and with a mind like that, this world could be yours.” I knew he was doing something nice for me—passing me through to high school even though I should have failed eighth grade—but I didn’t care much about my test scores or any of that, so I sat quietly in his office and looked at his black and gray beard. After that, I never went back.

  The truth is I never wanted the world to be mine. I just wanted some small piece of it. I wanted what my friends had. I wanted not to be afraid. Now it’s hard to know what to want. But suddenly, sharply, I know what I don’t want: I don’t want to keep having sex with strangers. I don’t want someone to yell slut at my face again. I don’t want to spend the night in another empty car or staircase. I don’t want Mr. Malekzadeh.

  I look up at my mother’s windows, and they seem like the only warm spot on earth. I wonder what will happen if I knock on her door. And I wonder what will happen if I don’t.

  “Who is it?” she calls. I know she’s pressing her eye to the peephole.

  “It’s me,” I say to her one eye.

  She swings the door open and stands there looking at me. “Where have you been?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “You can’t stay here,” she blurts out, stepping aside and opening the door the rest of the way.

  I walk in and look around. It’s as if I’m seeing her apartment for the first time—the walls cluttered with mirrors and prints of things that have nothing to do with our life: sailboats on a sea, Chinese landscapes, a Parisian cityscape, a smiling needlepoint tiger; the tables strewn with books and ashtrays and knickknacks; the stacks of record albums leaned up against the cabinet.

  “Where’s Joanne?” I ask.

  “She’s at a sleepover.”

  “I miss her.”

  “You should have thought about that before you ran away.”

  “Oh, because I got to see her so much when you put me in that psych ward, right? You never even came to visit me once.”

  “Sure, blame me. It’s all my fault.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  She lights a cigarette. “You should count your lucky stars that you were only in a hospital and not someplace worse.” The smoke curls from her nostrils as she talks.

  “Someplace worse?”

  She shakes her head as if she’s disagreeing with something. “I tried to have you put in detention. I told the police you were in too much danger on the streets, but they said they couldn’t lock you up because running away isn’t a crime.”

  I look at this woman who is my mother. She pulls hard on her cigarette, her mouth tight, then taps the cigarette roughly over the ashtray. The kitchen lights emphasize the sheen of her skin. I remember how once a long time ago I brought her a bunch of dandelions from the hill outside, and when I handed them to her, she held them to her nose, then to her heart. I remember thinking that I had fixed her, that maybe all she ever needed was this bright yellow slightly wilting gift. She put them in water in a small cup, but later that day I saw them in the trash.

  “I was thinking that maybe I could stop running away. Maybe I could start high school like I’m supposed to.”

  “I already told you, you can’t stay here.”

  Again I feel my throat burn. “Why do you hate me so much?”

  “Because I’m a terrible mother, remember? Just like you told the judge.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “I was wrong. I didn’t tell the judge about the bad things that Dad did, and I should have. But it was because I thought that was the only way I could have a happy life.”

  “And you see how far that got you.”

  “I was only nine. You’re going to have to forgive me sometime, you know.”

  She doesn’t answer, but her expression softens. “Are you hungry?”

  She boils some spaghetti and serves it with butter and salt. I eat ravenously and get full long before my plate is clear. “Thank you,” I say. “That was delicious.”

  “One night,” she says. “You can stay here one night, but I want you gone before Joanne gets back in the morning.”

  Suddenly, the morning fills me with dread. Where will I go then?

  After I wash the dishes, I go into the living room, lie back on the worn pink couch, and call my father. When he answers, I blurt into the phone, “I want to go back to school.”

  “Rita?”

  I’m not sure which of us is more surprised by the suddenness of this statement. “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m at Mom’s. She doesn’t want me to stay here past tonight, but I was hoping I could come back and live with you.”

  “Wow, Rita. I don’t know. Are you serious?”

  I think for a minute. I imagine going to the store to buy school supplies—fresh pencils and new pads of paper and soft pink eras
ers. “Yes,” I say, “I am.”

  He takes a long breath into the phone, followed by another. “Then I think maybe it’s time you come home.”

  And in that moment, I feel more hope than I can remember feeling. It’s as if the curtains to my future are finally opening. “Thank you.”

  I thank my mother, too, for letting me stay the night, but when I try to hug her, she stands stiffly. “I guess your father’s the big hero now.”

  “No,” I say. “It’s just that you said I couldn’t stay here.”

  “Big fucking hero he is.”

  “No, Mom, he’s far from a hero.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re all lovey-dovey with each other now. Maybe you could ask him where my child support is.”

  “I’m sorry. I know it isn’t fair. I’m just tired of running.”

  I reach to put my hand on her shoulder, but she backs away, and I give up. “I’m going to bed.”

  I leave her and slip back into my old room, into my old bed, and fall into a dreamless sleep. When I wake up, it’s still dark, and the apartment is quiet. I can’t sleep, so I tiptoe into the living room, where the records are. On the table opposite the stereo are Joanne’s schoolbooks. She has a big loose-leaf binder now, the kind she’s wanted since the first time she saw mine. On the front, she’s drawn a single smiley-face, dead-center and perfectly round. I open the binder and look at the new block of paper, which she’ll slowly fill with all the things she’ll learn. I flip to a page in the middle, grab a pen, and start writing. I love you, Joanne! And I miss you. Love, Rita. I add a smiling dog and a postscript: P.S. Be happy.

  I put on my mother’s headphones, decide on Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door, and lean back on the carpet with my eyes closed. And as the music goes, I go with it. But in the middle of “Carouselambra,” there is suddenly a hand yanking the headphone jack out of the receiver. My mother startles us both, and now the music is blasting through the apartment.

  “Why aren’t you in bed?” she shouts.

  I turn the volume down. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Why are you listening to druggie music? Are you on drugs? Did a little coke? Is that what you did?”

  “I’m not on drugs, and this is your album.”

  She squints down into my face. “How did you get coke anyway? Who’d you fuck to get it?”

  “I told you, I’m not high.” I can see there’s no use in my staying any longer, so I head back to the bedroom to get my bag.

  She follows me. “It’s not my fault you turned out to be a slut daughter. I never taught you that. You know, your father beat me black and blue because he wasn’t my first. One lousy guy before him.” Her voice bounds erratically up and down.

  I turn around and brush past her. “I’m leaving.”

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m calling Pat to see if I can stay there.” Pat is my favorite of my mother’s friends. She’s a tall and beautiful force of a woman who lives across the street and who once made me memorize her number in case I was ever in a bind. Her daughter is Joanne’s best friend, and though my mother won’t tell me where Joanne is, I’m pretty sure she’s there. I reach for the phone, but my mother beats me to it and snatches it off the cradle. “Please!” I beg. “Let me call her.”

  She sits down on the chair and clutches the phone to her chest. “Pat doesn’t want any druggies over there, either,” she chides.

  “Give me the phone!” I lean in and try to grab it from her hands, but she kicks at me. Reflexively, I swat her leg away, and she falls backwards in her chair. Then, silence.

  “Mom? Are you okay?”

  She starts squirming around, and when I hold out my hand to help her up, she smacks it away. “You fucking bitch!”

  “I didn’t mean it! I’m sorry!”

  I try again to help her up.

  “Get the fuck off of me, I’m calling the police!”

  “It was an accident! You know it was an accident!”

  She dials the phone. “Yes, can you please send the police to 3449 Carriage Hill Circle, Apartment 104? I’d like to press charges against my daughter for assaulting me.”

  “What are you doing!” I shriek. “Why are you doing this?”

  “You’ve had this coming for a long time,” she says.

  At that moment I realize there’s only one thing for me to do. Run.

  I tear out of the apartment, down the steps, and start running up the hill—just in time to meet the red swirl of police lights.

  As they cuff my hands behind my back, I listen to my Miranda rights. I say nothing. The tears are warm on my cheeks.

  At the station, I sit in a chair facing an officer’s desk. He asks me questions in a monotone. “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any tattoos?”

  “No.”

  “Any scars?”

  “Two on my leg.”

  “Which leg?”

  “My left.”

  “Eye color?” he asks, aiming his bark-colored eyes at mine. “Hazel? Green?”

  “Yes.”

  Then it’s my turn to ask him a question. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  He picks up a can of Coke and swigs hard. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down in his neck. “Well, if your mother doesn’t drop the charges, you’ll have to go to court. And while you wait for a hearing, you’ll probably go to Montrose.”

  I don’t mean to start crying again, but I can’t help it. I know what Montrose is: it’s the nastiest detention center around.

  “Can’t I call my father? Can’t he come get me?”

  “Not unless your mother drops the charges.”

  I wipe at my eyes. “Okay. What if she drops the charges?”

  “Then she comes to get you, and ya’ll go home and make up.”

  I call my mother, and when I hear her voice, I immediately start begging for her to drop the charges, but she tells me there’s nothing to discuss, that she’s trying to sleep, that I shouldn’t call her again. The phone clicks and is silent.

  The officer apologizes as he shuts me into one of the station cells. “I hate to have to do this to you,” he says, turning his key from the outside.

  I stand behind the bars. “I didn’t do it,” I tell him. “I didn’t assault my mother.”

  “You just tell the judge that, okay. Now try to get some sleep.”

  There’s a skinny cot on one side of my cell and a silver sink paired with a matching toilet on the other. Though it’s dark, the brightness from the station oozes in, along with an irregular rhythm of sounds—phones, voices, footsteps, coughing, laughing. I get into the cot, but the blanket is thin and won’t warm me. I can feel the cold starting to spread below my skin, working its way deep into my body.

  Rows and rows of corn line a long narrow road that leads to an outcropping of stone buildings. They will always be cold, in any season—you can see that. You don’t expect to see bars on the windows of stone buildings out in the middle of nowhere, but they’re there. You don’t expect the corn, or the corn beyond the corn. You don’t expect to reach the corn-edged end of the world, and get dropped behind it. You don’t expect to be strip-searched by a sun-wrinkled lady who tells you she ain’t got all goddamned day for you to take your clothes off. And you don’t expect her to watch you shower, making sure you use the whole handful of green antilice shampoo she’s globbed into your palm. You don’t expect the sky, before you enter one of these buildings, so ridiculously, painfully blue.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I spent six months at the end of Tommy’s lunge line before I realized that, though in many respects I felt like a child around her and around the horses (though it should be noted that most of the children who rode Shaddad were better riders than I was), I was an adult, and I didn
’t have to accept being yelled at by someone I was paying to teach me. On a sunny afternoon, I told Tommy this. I stood in front of her with my spine straight and my head up, and this woman, whose modus operandi was to intimidate, took a step back, away from me. And after that, she never yelled at me again.

  But I’d realized something else, too: there were other horses out there, and other instructors, and though Tommy had taught me a lot, I was ready to move on. So I traveled from barn to barn, and I rode.

  There were warmbloods and Thoroughbreds and ponies. There were days that were cool and breezy and days that were stifling and days when the rain didn’t want to stop. There were official barns and backyard barns and overgrown paddocks and open fields. There were riders of all ages and backgrounds and demographics, but in the barn, none of that mattered: we were all there for the horses—for that meditation in motion that’s unlike any other thing. There were instructors who barked and ones who cooed, and there were those who taught me to feel, and to observe. See there, how when you put your leg on gently, the horse moves away from it? Do you see how when you look in the direction you want to go, the horse goes in that direction? Do you see how a light tug on reins slows you, how a light tap with your heels makes the horse go forward? Do you see how you can control the tempo based on your posting speed? Do you see how when you slouch, the horse drops his head? Do you see that you’re sitting straighter than you were the last time? Do you see how when you praise the horse, the horse’s ears perk up? Do you see how the horse’s spirit is a mirror? Do you see?

  And there was an instructor who taught me what I’d most wanted to learn, and also what I’d been most scared to learn: to canter. By nature, the canter is an unbalanced gait because it’s a three-beat gait: a swing-like movement as the horse rises up and then comes down, each time kicking off anew. Closely related to the gallop, the canter is often a more powerful gait than the trot, and in order to ride the canter, one should be able to hinge fluidly at the hips while keeping the torso still and maintaining firm but flexible contact with the reins and keeping the legs relatively quiet—neither gripping too hard nor flopping around. In other words, a beginner rider is rarely any good at it.