We Speak in Storms

by Natalie Lund

  A breeze rustled the stalks so the tassels dipped together, fronds hissing. And then Callie heard something else—winding its way under, above, and around the sounds of the corn. Her dad, still on the phone, appeared unaware. Callie took a few steps back toward him, and the sounds hushed. When she returned to the tracks, they were audible again. She stood still, waiting for a lull in the gusts, holding her breath and closing her eyes. The sounds were fast and soft, like whispers. A year ago she would’ve called her best friend, Leslie, a staunch believer in the town’s ghost lore, and held her phone up to the air. Now she didn’t know what to think. Was it just the wind? Or something more?

  But the sounds grew clearer, more human. Find them. Save them.

  Was someone playing a trick on her? The person—or people—from the white car?

  “The police said we should wait in our car,” her father called sharply. He’d just lectured her about not listening, but the footsteps, the words on the wind—what had caused them? There had to be an explanation.

  Callie glanced one last time at the prints on the ground and walked back to her father, rubbing her arms to hide the goose bumps.

  The tornado had returned to the sky just as lazily as it had dropped, like someone reeling in an empty hook. The clouds were still rotating slowly, a few dangling wisps the only indication there’d even been a tornado. Brenna ached with disappointment; she’d been left behind again.

  As she moved back from the window, her senses returned one by one: the sting where the window screen had imprinted itself on her nose and forehead, the buzz of her phone, Manny’s music still thumping, the smell of melting cheese. Her stomach growled. The school’s lunch vouchers were only good for scoops of gelatinous spaghetti, canned green beans, slimy deli sandwiches, or ground meat that gave her the runs. Usually she survived on handfuls of chips she bummed off Amy, who’d been her best friend since seventh grade—back when the older boys started following her and her ample chest home and girls started snapping their gum at her. Brenna had gravitated toward Amy and her goth friends, Dutch and Jade, because they wore black shells of apathy, zipped high to cover their throats. The costume took some practice, but soon, Brenna was able to pretend the insults rolled right off the carapace she’d built—instead of what really happened: the words bored into her, making it hard for her to understand why she even bothered.

  In the kitchen, Manny was cutting his pizza with a pair of scissors, squirting red sauce onto their mother’s print of The Last Supper tacked above the countertop. He was taller than Brenna and lighter-skinned, but he had the same limp dark hair. She cut hers at steep angles, and occasionally bleached and dyed the tips bright shades of red or pink or orange. He let his grow long, to his shoulders, and wore it in a ponytail. His hairline was receding, even though he was only twenty. Before long, he’d look just like their dad, a nearly bald white truck driver based in Houston.

  Brenna snuck up beside Manny and snatched two pieces of pizza. He tried to grab her shirttail, but she pivoted away. The crust was hot and oily, and a string of cheese caught her wrist, burning her. She shuffled the pizza onto a paper towel and headed through the living room, which was painted mango orange—yet somehow still felt dank and dark. Pulga and Gordy, Manny’s friends, were sprawled on the couch, and had shoved aside her mother’s ceramic angel figurines to make way for their beer cans. Smoke clouded the overhead lights. Like Manny, they’d graduated from Mercer and started working in the John Deere warehouse.

  “Hey,” Gordy drawled at her, pausing their game and turning down the music. His eyes skimmed down her chest, but Brenna kept her face straight, her shell intact, withholding a shiver. “Like the new hair,” he said.

  Manny carried the pizza into the living room on a piece of cardboard. “Her hair is always new,” he said. Then he turned to Brenna: “You gonna pitch in or what?”

  Brenna reached into her pocket, took out a crumpled one-dollar bill, and tossed it at Manny with a smirk.

  Gordy lifted the bowl to her, but she shook her head—more disgusted by putting her lips where his had been than craving a hit.

  At the front door, she pulled her hooded sweatshirt on, shifting her pizza from hand to hand.

  “Where are you going? There was a tornado,” Gordy said.

  “Yeah, you three seemed really concerned.”

  “Let her go. She’s probably meeting Colin, right, B?” Manny sneered. Clearly, he suspected there was a reason Colin hadn’t been by in over a month. Manny thought Colin was a conceited prick and that Brenna was a conceited prick for dating him. “Too good for us, B?” he’d hiss as Brenna and Colin left for shows, open mic nights, or book signings in the Cities. Amy thought Colin was stuck-up too, but she always said, You do you, for which Brenna was grateful.

  Brenna ignored the snide remark, grabbed the car keys, and slammed the door behind her. Wind lifted her bangs, a few droplets of rain hitting her forehead. She inhaled. Their house had a way of clotting her thoughts, making her think about Colin until she couldn’t breathe. Outside, away, was better.

  She walked down their driveway and across the street to the Blue Light Cemetery, where the old-growth oaks sheltered all the graves etched with 1961. It wasn’t just the tornado victims—the bodies of Mercer’s earliest settlers had nourished those trees, their flesh and hair and bones becoming, somehow, part of the bark and branches.

  Brenna picked her way around gravestones that poked from the ground like crooked teeth. Tree roots had bullied them out of their neat ranks, and some had fallen over, their splintered pieces scattered. Brenna knew each gravestone—names, dates, inscriptions. Lonely, she’d explored the graveyard when she’d first moved to Mercer, mapping the stones in her notebook.

  She sank to the damp ground before her favorite, a granite stone near the oldest oak. MY SKY 1945–1961. Brenna had always loved it because it was the English for what her mother called her—mi cielo, my heaven. There was no inscription. No gender. No name. The stone was unusual in another way too; it was light pink when every other stone was white or gray. Who was this family that couldn’t bear to write My Sky’s real name—but picked the one stone that would stand out, that would be recognized and remembered? Gretta, the only remaining survivor of the 1961 tornado willing to talk about it, had recently told Brenna that My Sky’s name was actually Celeste.

  Brenna often found herself imagining what life the teen must have lived before the storm. Maybe she was a professional badminton player, or she loved miniatures, or had built her own tree house. Maybe she’d been allowed to be whoever she wanted, to write her own story. But that—Brenna knew—was not the lot for most girls from Mercer.

  Brenna took the last bite of pizza and leaned back against a tree, looking up at the canopy of leaves. When the moon was out, some of the stones had a bluish tint. People said they glowed blue if the dead wanted justice, though one of her teachers said it had to do with the type of stone they’d mined in Mercer for over a century, a stone that was impossible to find in the quarries now. It depressed Brenna that things could just be gone forever. She preferred the supernatural explanation. Not that she wanted a bunch of wronged ghosts wandering around—just that she liked the idea of there being an after. If she were dead, she’d want to see Colin’s pain, her parents’, her grandmother’s, even Manny’s, but eventually people would forget—unless you glowed blue as a reminder.

  Brenna hadn’t grown up in Mercer like her mother, but she’d adopted the town as her own—even if it had never fully adopted her. Believing was part of blending, of belonging to her mother’s hometown, to her mother. It wasn’t just the cemetery. Brenna had left thrift store teacups on the steps of the historical society’s museum for the poisoned Winston twins, who spent their afterlives smashing porcelain tea sets at their former house. She’d been a passenger in Dutch’s car when he put it in neutral in the middle of the town’s covered bridge and felt the car roll to the other side—pus
hed to safety, it was said, by the Clark family, who’d died there decades before. Brenna had fed Mrs. Jenson, a crow-ghost, who perched on top of the grain silo where the human Mrs. Jenson had been crushed by feed corn. Brenna had led reckless whiskey-fueled séances with Amy and Jade in the Storm Spirits’ cornfield, where they draped their heads in dark scarves, adopted Eastern European accents, and lit the saint candles she’d stolen from her grandmother. The spirits never answered, but she knew that they were listening. She knew they’d make their presence known when they had something to say.

  You’re too good to believe that shit, Colin had said once. But she did—then and now. What did that make her?

  As Brenna sat under the tree, Sky’s headstone lit blue and then red and blue again. Red and blue? Not ghosts. Cops. Her mother would be furious at her if she had to leave work and bail Brenna out for something stupid like trespassing in a cemetery after dark. Brenna stood, the bark snagging her hair, ready to put her hands up like she’d seen on the news. Brown people had to assume the worst, she knew. But then she realized: the cop car was headed for the country.

  If Colin were there, he’d climb into his Jeep and follow, fast, for the thrill of it, glassy-eyed from pot but never paranoid because Fuck the man. Said ironically, of course, because Colin loved irony and didn’t have to be afraid. Part of her believed that if she followed now, chasing thrills, playacting the Brenna she’d been with him, she’d feel whole again.

  Brenna swiped the mud off her ass and started back across the street to her driveway. She climbed into the gold Oldsmobile—nicknamed Golden Girl—that she shared with Manny, and cranked down the window so she could smoke. She accelerated into the country, spinning the radio dial for a news report.

  When an ambulance’s lights spun in her rearview mirror, Brenna pulled to the side. She let it speed ahead a few hundred yards and then she followed. It was illegal, she knew, and the thought made her lower abdomen throb. If Colin were beside her, he’d squeeze her leg, proud, his fingers lingering on the inside of her thigh. She blinked away the fantasy, a drumroll of pain in her throat.

  The ambulance sped down 1800, nearing the site of the old drive-in. Brenna could map the turns in her mind, the country roads as familiar to her as the graves in Blue Light Cemetery. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel—the first excitement she’d felt in months. Would bodies be strewn like seeds? The curse awakened? Spirits chattering? But before they reached the drive-in, the ambulance pulled onto the shoulder across from a blue sedan. Brenna flicked off her lights and pulled over too. She slouched down—in case anyone looked her way—and tried to make out what was happening. The cop car was parked in the bean field, high beams illuminating an old white car smashed against the base of a wind turbine. Brenna imagined how large the tornado must have been to lift and carry a car that far from the road. Giant, certainly, since it had also left a wide wake in the bean plants and a loose turbine blade dangling above like a half-plucked petal.

  At the edge of the field, a man who looked like a father in a catalog had his arm around a girl. He was talking to a cop and gesturing at the rows of beans. The girl kept glancing over her shoulder at the field behind them. She looked familiar from school, and Brenna tried to remember her name. Brown hair. Long-sleeve T-shirt and jeans. Wide cheekbones and a too-small nose. Nondescript. Callie. She’d heard around school that the girl’s mom was dying.

  Brenna climbed out of the car, crossed the road, and edged along a flooded drainage ditch, mud squelching beneath her shoes. The wind turbines hummed in the background, a hum that sank deep, like it was settling into her marrow. She couldn’t imagine living on one of the nearby farms with that constant drone.

  A cop with a handlebar mustache spotted Brenna, and she felt the throb in her abdomen again, the electricity of Colin’s fingers on the inside of her thigh.

  “Miss,” he said calmly. “Please return to your car.”

  “I just saw my friend here and I wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

  The shivering girl, Callie, blinked at Brenna, confused. She leaned into her drenched father’s arm and Brenna felt a pang of jealousy. Callie seemed to trust that her father’s arm would hold her up, an unthinking kind of trust.

  “What happened, Callie?” she asked.

  The girl startled at her name and looked up at her father, then back at Brenna.

  “Someone’s car got wrecked by the tornado,” the father said, nodding toward the field.

  “Is everyone okay?” Brenna asked.

  Callie shrugged and shifted back and forth on her feet. Brenna caught her glancing over her shoulder again. What was she looking for? Was there something else back there? Something to do with the spirits?

  The cop shooed Brenna with a wave of his hand.

  “All right. Back to your car. We need you off the shoulder. You can catch up later.”

  There was something going on, something Callie had seen—Brenna knew it in her gut, where her belief in the blue stones, in the spirits of October 7, 1961, in Mrs. Jenson, the crow-ghost, nested. It made her heartbeat quicken until it thudded in her ears. She had to find a way to talk to the girl again, so she pulled off her sweatshirt and tossed it at her. “Here. You look cold. You can give this back tomorrow at school.”

  Back in her car, Brenna thought of her mother, of all the unanswered texts on her phone about Colin and Manny, imagined her mother panicking that she’d arrive home later to a collapsed house, her children inside.

  We’re okay, she tapped out because the rest was too difficult to explain.

  Through the driver’s-side window, Brenna watched as the police searched the field. The skinny girl held the sweatshirt in front of her like it was a foreign object. Her father said something, and she put her arms through the sleeves, pulling it half on, the hood beneath her chin. Again, Callie looked over her shoulder, like something had called to her. Brenna tried to see into the rows of corn behind the girl, her body trilling with curiosity, but the night was pitch-black. What had the girl seen?

  In his bedroom after the all clear, Joshua flipped on the scanner he’d bought with money he’d earned from detasseling corn that summer. He liked to listen to the dispatchers’ calm voices and the policemen’s gruff replies as he drew. After a storm like this one, there was bound to be activity. Sure enough, the air crackled before the dispatcher spoke: “4752, I need an event number.”

  “52 here with Liam. ID 478292.”

  “10-4.”

  The radio hummed. Then a click as the dispatcher keyed her mic again.

  “4964, auto accident due to tornado, 1900 E between 400 N and 500 N.”

  “64, go ’head.”

  “Caller at 452 1900 E. County EMS and Mercer fire dispatched.”

  “64 responding.”

  Joshua recognized the address; it was right near the farm where they’d lived with his grandparents six years ago. What if the tornado had hit that house? Memories fired inside him. The corn sighing through the crack of his old bedroom window, the kitchen that smelled like it had been seasoned with generations of chicken noodle soup, and the alpaca rug they’d kept in the living room that he’d rolled on like a pup. He and Ruthie had spent their afternoons roaming across the bean and cornfields to the creek. They’d made swords of cattails and minions of the crickets they caught in empty butter tubs. A large weeping willow was their portal, and they’d pass through its long branches, emerging as heroes.

  But when his grandfather died and his grandmother followed a few months later, it was all gone. Just like that. He, Ruthie, and their mother moved to an apartment behind a laundromat, until, another year later, they relocated to Lawrence’s subdivision of tornado bait by the interstate.

  The farm was the only good thing about their town, the only place Joshua had felt free to become whoever or whatever he wanted, where he didn’t have to be the overweight kid with the smudged glasses
and the secret feelings he didn’t understand. He needed to make sure their old house was still standing.

  Joshua opened his bedroom door and listened. The television was on in his mother’s room, a reporter’s voice blaring down the hall, and the computer keys were clacking away in the office. No one would notice him gone.

  * * *

  * * *

  Outside, he looked up at the mat of gray clouds in the night sky. They were peaceful now, the air surprisingly cool. He unchained the bike he’d bought with money from blueberry picking when he was ten. It was too dark to ride, but he pedaled out of their neighborhood anyway—his knees sticking out as though he were a grasshopper—and turned onto Main Street. Downtown, only the diner, a bar, and the one-screen movie theater that had replaced the drive-in were open. A few paper cups clattered in the breeze along the curb as though racing him.

  In the country, he pedaled into the wind, his quads and knees aching and his eyes burning with tears. The streetlamps were behind him, but it wasn’t as dark as it had been when he was a kid on the farm. New wind turbines blinked red, like an alien army sending SOS signals to the clouds. He and Ruthie had played in real dark on the farm—not beneath the yellow glow of fast-food signs or those blinking fuckers. Their back deck was a boat at sea, the corn shuffling in the breeze the waves, the small orange cat his parrot on the shoulder. Beyond the porch light, there were sea monsters; there were the ghosts of shipwrecked pirates; there were the swimming dead. And, as a captain with the power to see into the great beyond, Joshua had defeated them all.