Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  At the mall, I took my niece to buy some clothes while my sister got a pedicure in the nail salon. Kiana was thirteen and in her bliss as she stepped from the dressing room modeling one outfit after another, twirling around under the glaring store lights. We’d just made our first purchase when my sister called, upset. I told her we’d be right over, and when we arrived, she was in the waiting area in the front of the nail salon, her face flushed. “What’s wrong?” we asked.

  “That girl over there”—she nodded with her head—“did a terrible job. She rushed through everything, barely did my cuticles, and massaged me for like three seconds, like this.” She demonstrated by hastily and sloppily rubbing my hand. “And it’s streaked!” Her voice was raised and unsteady, and I could see she was near tears.

  I looked down at her feet. She’d chosen a coral polish, and I thought it looked okay, but I’d never had a pedicure and didn’t know what to expect. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  “No. I want my money back.” She approached the counter. “This is ridiculous.”

  The manager came up, and Joanne repeated what she told us, and he said, “No refunds. It says here on the sign.”

  My sister’s response to that was to get louder. “I don’t care what it says on your stupid sign. I didn’t get what I paid for, and Miss Thing over there has an attitude problem. What, is she too good to massage my feet?”

  By then some customers in the store had begun to notice. I touched my hand to Joanne’s arm and said, “C’mon, they’re not worth it. Let’s just go.”

  Her daughter stood behind me. “Yeah, Mom, let’s just go.”

  But instead of going, Joanne walked further into the store and yelled, “I’m not leaving until I get my money back!”

  And the manicurist, who was still sitting at her little station, yelled back, “No money back!”

  By then everyone in the store had gone silent. Immediately to our right was a wall of women up high with their feet in tubs, sort of like an audience in bleacher stands.

  “C’mon, bitch, let’s take this outside!” yelled my little sister.

  The manicurist responded with something unintelligible, to which Joanne responded by pulling the purple foam toe separators out of her toes and throwing them at her. Only she missed, and hit a customer in the back of the head. The customer hunched forward and put her hands over her head, and I pulled my sister out of the store.

  I felt sad for Joanne. She was a single mother who’d put herself through school and worked hard to make a living as a nurse, and she rarely treated herself to anything. She spent all of her time as a caretaker, both at work and at home, and she’d always done this alone—she’d never believed in herself enough to date a man who was good to her, so no man she ever dated was good to her. And this one special thing she was giving herself didn’t end up being special at all. The lady had rushed her. She’d made her feel small. And I saw then a fundamental difference between my sister and me. I’d gotten away from our childhood home—I’d had the shoulder on the side of the road—and she was left there alone, with no choice but to fight. She’d been fighting since she was three and stood in between my father’s belt and me. And she was still fighting. What a struggle it was to know when to fight and when to flee.

  After we left the nail salon, I took my sister and niece shopping, and we laughed and held hands and made things better. Then I drove back to Massachusetts from Baltimore, fighting through several more panic attacks on the way, taking circuitous detours on back roads to avoid the highway when I could.

  Once I was home, I stopped driving on highways completely. I was defeated. It had been more than a year since my last panic attack, and I’d thought I was cured. Then one drive changed everything. When we’re in a child place, Norm had told me, we go home. I couldn’t stop thinking about my sister, how I’d gotten away from our parents but she hadn’t. The way I’d always assuaged my guilt for leaving her was to remind myself that she never got it from my parents like I did, that I was the firstborn, the target, and she was the round angelic baby who almost died but didn’t. In my heart, she was still that baby, and I was wrapping her in sparkling things from a jewelry box with a twirling ballerina inside. But I was aware of my helplessness, the vastness of it, and how the past keeps happening, though it remains so firmly out of our reach.

  “The potential is always there,” Norm said, as I sat pouting across from him on the big white couch, “for any of us to revert back to a child state. We all have the capacity for panic, so there is no cure, per se. But as long as you can continue to separate the child from the adult, panic will never rule you again.”

  Norm suggested that we do some EMDR to process what had happened on that Brooklyn highway, but I wasn’t ready to go back there. And my inability to drive on highways simply became a fact of my life.

  “Be careful,” said Norm. “Avoidance is what panic eats for breakfast.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  Things at the new pond-side barn started out promising. When I went to bring Claret in from the paddocks, he came to me. Where I led him, he followed me. What I asked of him, he gave to me. And though we weren’t piaffing and passaging around the arena, I rode him on my own, and we did okay. But I was aware that I still needed help. There was so much I didn’t know, and in the school of dressage, I was a toddler. So I tried a few lessons with Laura, the barn owner, and she seemed mellow and knowledgeable, and Claret seemed happy, so I agreed to let her train us.

  Laura had grown up on the property, and her father built the barn for her when she was a girl. If life were an experiment, she would have been my opposite: a girl whose parents wanted to give her everything. I wondered what it had been like for her, growing up with that unshakable haven, knowing that wherever she went in the world, she had that to come home to. I wanted to ask her what Christmases were like, what any ordinary morning was like, when the day shone ahead like a big fat jewel.

  One day after a lesson, I was giving Claret a bath in the wash stall and he began to spook. I don’t know if it was the closed space of the stall or the birds flying in just over his head to a nest in the corner or the snake of a hose near his feet on the ground, but he started taking little hoppy steps as his head shot up and his lip quivered. I could see he felt trapped. As he tried to flee, he lunged forward, but the crossties stopped him and he fell backwards, his hind legs buckling beneath him. Now he was at the apex of panic, the adrenaline bulging out the veins in his neck, his hooves scrambling as he launched himself up and this time broke the crossties.

  Fortunately, Sal, the equine massage therapist who worked on some of the horses there, happened to be standing nearby and helped me get ahold of him. “There, there,” he said in a gentle melodic voice that seemed incongruous with his hulking stature and rolled up sleeves bearing his muscles and tattoos. As he helped me lead Claret back to his stall, I thanked him and booked Claret’s very first massage. “He’s sure going to need one after that,” I said.

  The next time Claret started to spook in the wash stall, I quickly unhooked the crossties while he hopped around, and I patted his neck. He was breathing hard, and I knew he wanted to flee again. “You’re okay,” I said, keeping my hand against him. “You’re okay.” And after a few seconds he was standing still again. When he turned to put his nose against my arm, I reached into my pocket and gave him a cookie, and with each chew, I could see him relax a little more. After another cookie, he began to lick my palm in a slow rhythm that seemed to be calming us both.

  Just then, Laura walked over to me. “Enough babying,” she said. “He needs to learn to deal.”

  She took Claret from me abruptly and tied him back into the wash stall, and I could see the tension returning to his face, his eyes darting nervously at me and the door and the hose on the floor. I went to soothe him, but Laura told me to get out of the way. She turned on the hose, and as he started to spook again, she ye
lled, “Cut it out!” But he couldn’t cut it out. I knew; I had lived it. He was panicking, and I was watching the fear escalate, watching him try to get away. When he scooted over in Laura’s direction, she smacked him. “Don’t you crowd my space!” she yelled. Then she turned to me. “He’s too big a horse to be losing his shit like this. Believe me, you don’t want him smashing you into the wall. He needs to learn to stand still and respect your space.” She had a point. But even though I was a novice who had little more than a thimbleful of knowledge about horses, I knew what it was to be a flight animal. And I knew that the way to Claret’s heart would never be with a hard hand.

  It didn’t take long before I learned that the kind of lesson we would have depended on Laura’s mood. Sometimes she sat in her chair in the doorway and taught the entire lesson without moving. Other times, she was up, yelling, chasing us around the arena. “Toes in, hands down, look where you’re going!” As I focused on my hands, I’d lose the position of my feet, and when I focused on my feet, I’d tilt my head down, and it seemed that I couldn’t get the independence I needed in my various body parts, or the synchronization.

  On one very hot day, Claret and I had been circling the arena for over an hour. We were drenched in sweat, and I couldn’t seem to get it right, and a storm was coming. Through the little windows I could see the clouds rolling in, so dense I could almost feel their weight pressing on the roof. “I think he’s had enough,” I said meekly. I had come to accept that the cost of learning to ride a horse was to have someone yelling at you three days a week, so I rarely spoke up at all. “He’s fine,” she said. “Now hands down, feet in . . .” I was trying to get Claret to canter. I hadn’t cantered him in weeks, since Laura had started us on her training program. Everything I’d learned and read taught that you ask a horse to canter with the outside leg back, but Laura was insisting I ask with my inside leg. And I could not pick up the canter.

  At one point, Laura’s helper poked her head into the arena. “Hey guys, there’s a tornado coming. Just heard it on the radio. One touched down five miles from here.”

  By then the rain and wind were already starting to whip against the windows and batter the roof. “Okay,” Laura said. “Try it again.”

  “We’re going to die,” I said.

  “No, you’re going to canter.”

  So in a moment when she’d looked out at the crumbling heavens, I snuck my outside leg back and asked him to canter. And he cantered. I stroked his neck. “Good boy!”

  “Now you’re finished,” Laura said.

  I led Claret back to his stall and wondered how long it would take for a tornado to travel five miles. I gave him a cookie and buried my nose into his neck while he licked my open palm. I didn’t care that we were both sweaty—I took in the musk of him, and it grounded me. I began to massage Claret’s back, which I thought might be tight after our lesson, and he whipped his head around to massage mine with his lips, the way horses do to each other in the fields. “Thank you,” I said. The wind picked up, and we both stopped to look out the window. The trees were starting to bend, and the charcoal sky was beginning to boil. I considered trying to find better shelter but quickly decided against it. We were two wild things, he and I, and I would not leave him. Let the tornado come.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Twenty years later, the corn still grows along the road. The old stone buildings still stand, some making a crooked ascent toward the sky. And the grounds are still beautiful—hilly, green. A few years after I left the Montrose detention center for the last time, it was condemned and shut down, and the Army National Guard bought the land. I walk from building to building alongside Major Kohler, a tall, affable veteran with eyelashes most women dream about. He’s wearing fatigues and a black beret, which suits his dark hair and handsome features well. Though he’s supposed to be escorting me, he lets me give the tour. “Here’s where I stayed,” I tell him, pointing to a mansion-size stone building that, even in the daylight, looms dark. Ivy spindles across its stone face, obscuring more than half of it.

  Major Kohler sweeps his eyes over me. “It’s hard to believe you were in a detention center.” I’m wearing a flared skirt, a lacy camisole, sandals, and a necklace I made out of kyanite, labradorite, and Roman glass. “What did you do wrong, anyway?” he wants to know.

  I consider his question and find I have no good answer. “I ran away.”

  The military has already renovated most of the buildings, many for office space, some for barracks, but a few are still in disarray. We walk through one that’s been gutted. Scraps of wood and nails are strewn across the subfloor. “Be careful,” Major Kohler says, holding the door for me. The dirt from the rubble turns my toes black.

  The grounds are vacant as we stroll from building to building. There’s something intimate about sharing this quiet time with him, this late afternoon, these steps through the grass with this stranger who’s willing to let me go back, open doors, climb steps, crest hills. I can still see the girls piled into the bathroom, elbowing each other for water. I can see us on our knees, scrubbing the floors with steel wool pads. I can see us jammed together in that one big room with nothing to do but stare again and again at the same sullen faces, playing Spades over and over and poring over magazines until we memorized every recipe for pie, dreaming of a different life.

  Major Kohler asks why I ran away, and again, I don’t know how to answer. How do I tell a stranger an answer like that? But then I realize the answer is simple. “I ran away because I believed there was something better out there.”

  “Did you find it?” he asks.

  I look around at the land and remember how I once gazed at it from inside the barred windows, how I longed for this, here, now—this very moment. A groundhog skitters by, all fat with summer. “Yes,” I tell him, “I did.” And something about the way Major Kohler slowly nods his head makes me believe he understands.

  As we start to head back toward my car, we come upon a spider in her web in the corner of a building. The light pressing against it has created a brilliant rainbow, and we stare silently for a moment at the luminous silk. “It’s kind of like your life in a way,” says Major Kohler, “finding a rainbow in a spiderweb.”

  A place inside me turns quiet. Some of us didn’t make it through. A phantasm comes into focus, taps against me from inside. Taby. Her blue eyes. Her laugh. Her hair in the sun. Sometimes I think I can feel the impact of the car crash that killed her only two years after she left the Jackson Unit. I imagine the volume of it, the force. I imagine her laughing in her last seconds, probably with a beer in her hand, tilting her head to feel the wind rush through her open window.

  And Dallas. On a summer night three years after he wrote our names in bubble letters, he blew his head off with a shotgun. His last moments are harder for me to picture. I get as far as his hands shaking at the barrel, its large hole of a mouth pointed at the center of his face. His face—that’s where, each time, I’m sent back to the mountains, to his inquisitive and playful eyes. I keep seeing that ready smile, those dimples. And I hear his voice—I’m comin’ for you. I can’t let him pull the trigger.

  I almost didn’t make it through, either. When they released me from the Jackson Unit, things between my mother and me didn’t change: it wasn’t the happy ending I’d hoped for that day when Mr. Ware put a Cat Stevens cassette tape into my hand and I drove off suddenly reunited with my family. I will never know why, exactly, my mother had so much hatred for me, but I think part of it was displaced hatred for herself. Part of it may have also been the demands I brought to her young life, and the divorce battle with my father, when I told the judge I no longer wanted to live with her, and a raw jealousy that was born the moment I started to become a woman—but knowing these things didn’t change them. So I spent a few months in her apartment before moving out: I ran away from her for the last time by driving off with the first guy who was reasonably nice to me. He was a construct
ion worker with long hair and freckles and a habit of putting his cigarettes out on the heels of his cowboy boots. I had just turned sixteen. He was twenty-four. Our life was threadbare.

  After years of bouncing back and forth between institutions and the streets, I’d finally come to a halt, and I didn’t know what to do with myself in the stillness. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know how to live in anything other than the present tense. What I did know—what I felt late at night when I was the only one awake—was a nameless desire pulsing in me so insistently, so powerfully, that I thought it would crack me open.

  I got a job as a hostess in a restaurant and started drinking after my shifts, whenever the bartender felt like sneaking me shots. I didn’t love the man I lived with, and when I started coming home at four in the morning with the scent of other men’s cologne on my neck, he left. Weeks later I let a man I barely knew slip a needle into the tender part of my arm, and for the first time, my desire was sated. That was all it took—that one rush, that one moment that rose up from my life like a hydrogen bomb. Here, it was saying, is your present tense. In the months that followed, there was nothing else. I shot cocaine into my arms until the track marks became scabs, which I kept poking through with more needles. It was summer, and unlike the other junkies, I didn’t try to hide my arms—I wore those dark red lines proudly wherever I went. Some might say my flagrant display of what should have been my wicked secret was, in fact, a cry for help, but I think it was more a kind of testimony, as was the blood left on the sheets after I’d lost my virginity: I have endured.