Weather Woman

by Cai Emmons

  Joe plunks down two papers, The Boston Globe and The New York Times, keeps another one stashed under his armpit. He grins and leans down to kiss her. He is firmly rooted in summer, unshaven, blond hair tousled, wearing shorts and flip-flops.

  “News from the front,” he says, only half-suppressing a grin that tells her he’s got something up his sleeve. "Cushing is going for medical tests in Portland. He's been having some abdominal pain." He pours himself coffee and sits.

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “He’s seventy-four. But the more important news is this.” He pulls the other newspaper from under his arm, flattens it on the table with his palm and angles it toward her. The Meteor, one of those tabloids.

  “Why did you get that?”

  “Look. That’s Bronwyn, isn’t it?”

  She stares down at the pixelated newsprint picture. It’s a blurry closeup, but unmistakably Bronwyn, clearly identifiable by the mane of russet hair and the planet-sized green eyes. She stands in front of a weather map, gesturing, looking different than she did a few weeks ago when Diane took her for dinner. A little thinner maybe. It is the largest photo of three on the cover, even larger than the unflattering shot of Angelina Jolie. WEATHER WOMAN INFLUENCES WEATHER HERSELF, says the caption under Bronwyn.

  “Oh, for god’s sake, what is this? Did you read the article?”

  Joe shrugs. “The usual tabloid fare.”

  She flips through the pages, past weight loss ads and ads for penile enlargement, until she arrives at the page with yet another photo of Bronwyn, the same one maybe, but this one showing her full body. Diane reads aloud over Joe’s intermittent chuckling.

  “‘Robots are making our purchases and doing our taxes these days, so why couldn’t a meteorologist change the weather? It turns out this is exactly what meteorologist and former MIT student Bronwyn Artair says she can do . . .’” Diane glances up at Joe. “This is ridiculous.” He shrugs; she resumes reading. “‘At a recent wedding in Southern New Hampshire, the bride, Nicole Simms, reported that Ms. Artair stopped the rain. It was awesome. It was supernatural, said Nicole. She did it because she knew I was desperate for sun.’”

  “Imagine writing for a paper like that,” Joe says. “I wouldn’t mind having that job.”

  “Please, this isn’t funny. I don’t understand how this happened.”

  “Pure and simple. They needed a story, they made it up. It’s great copy for a hungry readership.”

  “But what would prompt it? It must be based on something. They wouldn’t make it up out of the blue. And why did they have to mention MIT?”

  “They probably wanted to say something that would make it seem credible.”

  “I wish I could find this as funny as you do. I wonder if she’s seen it.”

  “Don’t bother getting worked up. It’s only entertainment. Nobody believes this stuff and it’s not hurting anyone.”

  “Easy for you to say—it’s not your reputation.”

  “This has no bearing on you.”

  “Oh, I think it does.”

  Joe reins in his amusement and turns to separating the sections of The Times and The Globe, laying out the news sections for her—she likes to read those first—the sports and book reviews for himself. It still surprises her to see how meticulous he can be in isolated activities, when in most areas of his life he’s such a slob. At night he abandons his clothes wherever he takes them off. At least she’s trained him to pick them up later—she’s made it clear she’s not his mother.

  A seagull comes in for a blustery landing on the deck’s banister. She looks down at the picture again as if to wring from it an answer. Is this something someone did to Bronwyn, or something Bronwyn brought upon herself? When they had dinner in Portsmouth it was clear she was a little abstracted, and more nervous than usual. She’d been dumped by her boyfriend, so that was upsetting her, but Diane remembers thinking there might have been something else. Bronwyn can’t really have said these things the paper says she has said, can she?

  Joe isn’t reading, he’s eyeing her across the sports section. “Will you get in touch with her?”

  “Of course. I have to find out how this happened.”

  “Would you want her back at school after this?”

  “I’m certainly not going to hold against her what someone else has said or done. There has to be some credible explanation.”

  Joe lifts his face to the sun and closes his eyes, and in mock-rote fashion he quotes what she has so often said to him: “Intuition, imagination, chance, and anomalies also play a role in the scientific method.”

  Sweet Joe. No matter how rattled she is, he can always make her laugh. How lucky she is to have found this rumpled younger man. She loves that Joe’s brain works so differently from hers and encourages her to see things from other angles. Joe the Gem. She laughs, then grows silent, pushes the paper aside, and turns back to the bubbling mud flats to pick at her worry.

  21

  She spends the night at Earl’s because, kind man that he is, he suggests it, and it seems cruel to ask him to drive her two hours south to the Holiday Inn and then two hours back again. Lying in the single bed of his small guest room, every flat surface covered with a collection of ceramic pigs, she is too agitated to sleep well. She dreams she’s pressing though a crowd of many women of different ages, all reaching out to stroke her hair. When the crowd parts, she spots the white-haired Native American woman Vince spoke of. She beckons to Bronwyn and winks. Bronwyn jerks awake and Vince fills her mind. She remembers him mocking the Native American woman, laughing at her communion with spirits. What a despicable human being he has turned out to be, and how strange that he and kind Earl are friends. She thinks of Earl’s flock, Patty Birch and the others, taking her skill for granted and thinking it means she is good. They only think that because, after all the destruction they’ve been through, all the death they’ve witnessed, they need to believe something is good. But just having this skill does not make her a good person. She isn’t bad either, she hopes, but she doesn’t like people boxing her in, telling her who she is. Perhaps this is the same reason Earl dislikes naming things. Tomorrow Earl will drive her back to Oklahoma City and she will collect her things at the Holiday Inn and book a flight out. This trip has not turned out as she thought it would, and she can’t figure out how to reshape it to make it feel right.

  She gets up and stares out the guest room window. It is hazy, but a slim crescent moon sheds more light through the vapor than it seems such a scant moon should, illuminating the fields around Earl’s house. Such an incorrigibly lonely landscape.

  She takes the quilt from the bed and tiptoes downstairs and outside where she settles in the grass, insects trumpeting, the stillness deceptive. She lies on the quilt pressing her ear to the earth. Across the plains in Western Kansas and Oklahoma fronts are converging, winds have begun to spin. The haze drifts lazily over the moon. Even the earth likes to hold onto secrets, she thinks. Everything throbs with imminent mayhem.

  Much later, the first light of dawn serenades her awake. She rises, light-headed but settled in her body again and clarified, knowing what she knows, happy to be going home. Inside she dresses, and when she comes downstairs Earl is in the kitchen making them breakfast. Scrambled eggs, toast, bacon. She eats so ravenously Earl laughs. He wants her to stay, not only for the week, but permanently. Of course she can’t do that. If she were working with Vince that would have been one thing, but what does Earl have in mind? Simply waiting for tornadoes to materialize would not make for a full life.

  “But you have a mission here,” he says. He is straightforward and guileless. Is that what makes him likable?

  “I’ll think about it,” she says. But her mind is made up.

  “You miss people at home? A boyfriend maybe?”

  By the time they finish breakfast the sky has darkened again, sooner than she expected, and she goes back outside and wanders the perimeter of the lawn. Earl knows to leave her alone, let he
r think. He probably hopes she’ll change her mind about leaving. Dour mammatus clouds march by overhead, turning the daylight to dusk as if night will arrive early. This place, she has to admit, is a cloud-lover’s paradise. Through the open window she can hear Earl moving quickly about like a terrier in a thunderstorm.

  A car pulls into the driveway and someone gets out and goes inside, she doesn’t see who. Perhaps someone is here for pastoral counseling. The TV goes on and through the open window she hears Vince’s stentorian pronouncements. All over Kansas and Oklahoma people are tuning in to his station; every ten or fifteen minutes his advisories will be updated. She tries to block it out. The earth and its atmosphere have more important things to say to her, but their language is more nuanced and subtle, and understanding it requires her full attention.

  A few more cars pull in. Why didn’t Earl mention he would be having visitors? Or are these visits unplanned? She recognizes some of the faces from last night but, resisting the distraction, she ambles farther away from the house and looks southwest, her uplifted face devoted to the sky and the parcels of undulating air which take her into their tutelage. She visualizes the advance, feels the summons, hears the hum, low and intermittent at first, then gaining in strength and volume. Her limbs tingle. The foreground dims. Earl’s yard, the alfalfa fields beyond, the copses of cottonwoods, all vanish from view, and the TV’s clamor, the passing cars, all dial back to silence. The hum rules. The wall cloud advances. Rain comes down in a sudden wash like a plummeting drop cloth.

  She is aloft now, near the dry line, an electromagnetic and thermodynamic force, anger and intention and hope turned to heat, an element in the chaos, disembodied, abstracted, pure will set against wind shear, spin, lift.

  After the bombast has receded and given way to a quiescent day, mild and clear, she goes back inside where Earl’s guests, ten or twelve people, greet her, clapping, bowing, shaking their heads in amazement. They make room for her to lie on the couch, bring pillows and quilts. The TV is still on, but muted now. For a moment she thinks Vince himself is in the room, but it’s only because of the virulence of his stare which pierces the fourth wall angrily: You, you, you—this is my domain. Get out of here.

  Before the guests leave they press gifts upon her: a plate of oatmeal cookies, an amber amulet hung on a leather thong, a black velvet hair ribbon.

  “We wish you wouldn’t leave,” Patty Birch says. “My husband would have loved to meet you.” Tears pool on her lower lids, making flood plains of her eyes. She pats Bronwyn’s arm with her bloated hand. “I hope you’ll think of us.”

  Bronwyn and Earl drive in silence back down the now-familiar road to Oklahoma City. She stares at his green Converse on the gas pedal and a great fondness blooms in her for the existence of Earl, who she has known for less than forty-eight hours. She feels guilty for leaving. In the lobby of the Holiday Inn an instrumental rendition of “Here Comes the Sun” plays over the sound system. She and Earl hug. What is there to say? He wants her to stay and she is not going to stay. She watches him traverse the lobby to the front door where he turns and takes off his cap. Grinning, he bows.

  22

  She arrives home after dark, sniffing the river’s brackish scent and the faint lingering smell of the dead raccoon, feeling her way into the cabin by the river without turning on lights, as if to exist for a while unseen will delay her return and its inevitable medley of decisions. The cabin smells musty. She makes her way to the screened-in porch and lets her skin imbibe the air. A slight breeze from the river carries the perfume of wet wood and decay.

  It’s good to be home seeing the sash of the river, the silhouettes of the bowing willows. Who am I? she keeps asking. In answer she says her name over and over, “Bronwyn Artair, Bronwyn Artair.” The sound of her name echoes through the cabin without any meaning attached, making her wonder if she has cast off too many atoms during the episodes, dismantling and rebuilding herself too many times.

  In three days away so many messages have piled up, three emails from Diane alone. She doesn’t open them. She was another person with an entirely different genome when she worked alongside Diane. She unpacks slowly, forgetting for seconds at a time where each item belongs, then retrofitting herself to remember. Time seems to bounce around like lobbed tennis balls. She misses Earl, feels guilty again about having left him. He has proven to be the perfect counterbalance to Vince.

  Before retiring she turns on the TV to watch her replacement, Chip. He has a square face, eyebrows that hunker too close to his eyes, and a serious mouth he purses and re-purses. She can see why Stuart is eager to have her back. She emails Stuart to tell him she has returned early and will be at work tomorrow.

  After turning off the TV and turning out the light, she lies in bed for a long time, wide awake, thinking of Earl and Vince, and of Patty Birch’s husband being lifted in his truck. Maybe he felt weightless for a moment before he was gone, pleasantly stripped of mortality and responsibility. She sees the apocalyptic wall cloud turning day into night as it lowered. New Hampshire seems tame after Kansas, quiet and deceptively safe. She is only able to relax and find sleep when she hears the hooting owl that she has come to think of as hers.

  She dresses carefully for work, assessing the proper feminine-to-professional ratio and choosing, with Stuart in mind, the outfit with the higher feminine quotient, a purple skirt and a formfitting pink sweater with a lower neckline than she usually favors. She needs to regain her footing with Stuart, needs to appear contrite and compliant, at least until she decides to be otherwise. So continues her double life: the steely thermodynamic Bronwyn clad deceptively in pumps and pink, the brave and fiery woman playing the timid one, the remorseless woman feigning contrition.

  The station sucks her back into its cavernous claustrophobic dimness then explodes over her in the form of Nicole who jumps up from her desk in a tempest of anxious whispering, eyebrows rising and falling with encrypted messages.

  “Bathroom,” she says.

  “Now?”

  Nicole seizes a bag from under her desk and takes off. Bronwyn follows, ducking a little, as if a storm system is besieging them and the roof is unreliable. The bathroom is empty, but Nicole still feels a need to whisper.

  “It’s been so weird since you’ve been gone. Stuart hated what Chip was doing. He’s a real loser on air.” She leans so close her words become wind on Bronwyn’s cheek. “But here’s the thing—I was at CVS yesterday and I saw this.” She yanks a folded newspaper from her bag and lays it on the sink. The Meteor. “Quick,” she says.

  Bronwyn looks down at a grainy photograph of herself giving a weather report, the map of New England a backdrop. Her organs clus ter and surge, as if governed tidally. WEATHER WOMAN INFLUENCES WEATHER HERSELF, says the caption. She grabs the paper from Nicole. “Ugh. I can’t believe this. He promised he wouldn’t write anything.”

  Nicole shrugs, her eyes mournful. “I’m so sorry. It’s my fault, I know. I mean if I hadn’t said anything—”

  “It’s not your fault. It’s men. It’s always men.” As soon as she says this she thinks guiltily of Earl. “Has Stuart seen it?”

  “He hasn’t said anything. I doubt if he buys papers like this.”

  “Yeah, but someone will tell him. One of those lonely viewers he’s always talking about.” Bronwyn opens the paper and leafs quickly through it to find another unflattering broadcast photo of herself. She skims the copy. Entirely fabricated.

  “You can keep that. I saved it for you.”

  “Thanks. I should get to work.” Bronwyn pauses to assess herself in the mirror. Her skin has the look of a frosted window pane with patches of translucence through which underlying blotchiness shows. “Hey, Nicole, do I look like—like I’m—leaking?”

  “How do you mean? Leaking what? Like pee?”

  “No. My face? Does it look regular?”

  “Okay to me.” Nicole laughs nervously.

  Bronwyn navigates down the hallway, across the set, and to her c
onsole in a daze, waving greetings without pausing to talk. What a stupid article. Why would anyone write such drivel? For what—to sell papers and pander to people’s schadenfreude? Once again she has misread another human being completely. To think that she was, for a moment at least, attracted to the guy.

  She logs onto the National Weather Service feed. There’s a tropical depression in the Caribbean that could possibly affect New England weather next week, though it doesn’t appear to be gaining much strength. But there’s worse news. The fires in Southern California have mushroomed out of control to become worse than any on record. And Tornado Alley is in for another bad spell. Global warming aside, there’s no denying that this is an exceptionally bad weather year. God, she feels terrible for Earl.

  Her own report for today is straightforward. A high pressure system will keep things sunny for a couple of days, but then some of the rain from the Midwest will be coming in. It’s such a standard report she could phone it in. She stares at the screen, doing nothing, chips of conversation floating around her, bubbly as phosphorescence. Gwen and Brant are discussing their Labor Day plans, and weighing the value and danger of pit bulls. She will leave a message for Matt Vassily telling him what a dick he is.

  She scrolls and clicks around her computer and arrives at some news footage of one of the LA fires. It is mesmerizing in its hunger, its insatiability, its elusiveness. It seems to retreat for a while as if going to sleep, then it rears up again without apparent provocation. It gallivants through the trees, a Siren confident she’ll never be punished. Come, come, I will warm you. It takes what it wants on its own terms, oblivious to human needs.

  Fire entrances humans, she thinks, because, like water and wind, it cannot be held, cannot be known tactilely, hapticly. What can’t be touched and held cannot be controlled. She thinks of how she herself has sometimes resisted the touch of a man. Men are always bigger than she, and usually stronger, and to be touched by them has meant relinquishing something.