by Natalie Lund
The next jab caught him as he erased the errant mark. He closed his sketchpad, took out his phone, and scooted as far forward as his knees would allow, his forehead on the seat in front of him, his stomach folded uncomfortably against his thighs.
On the Mercer Journal’s home page, there was an image of the crashed car, the first he’d seen taken in daylight. The car’s rims and tire sidewalls were white, the bumper chrome. It had sleek fins and round, shattered taillights. The dimpled roof sloped upward, so the cabin was harp-shaped. An angel car.
The caption said it was a 1959 Pontiac Catalina, allegedly stolen from the estate of the deceased Edward Milton II, of Richwood, Indiana. There was no mention of the VW bus anywhere.
Joshua typed Edward Milton II and obituary into the search bar.
Edward Milton II, 71, passed away on September 16, 2017, surrounded by family.
Milton was born on June 10, 1944, in Mercer, Illinois. He graduated from Mercer High School in 1962, worked as a firefighter, and proudly served during the Vietnam War. He moved to Richwood after inheriting his in-laws’ farm. Milton was a collector of antique cars and motorcycles. He also loved baseball.
He is survived by his daughter, Monica Regent; his grandkids, Katie, Henry, and Alexis Regent; and his dog, Charlie. He was preceded in death by his wife, Carolyn.
Visitation will be from noon until the time of the service at 2:00 p.m. on September 19, 2017, at St. Benedict’s Chapel. Burial will follow at Claibourne Cemetery.
Joshua drummed his finger on his knee. One of the man’s cars ended up near another antique car in Mercer, his hometown, after his death. He’d heard kids gossiping about the owner being dead in Indiana, but no one had mentioned that he’d grown up here. That fact was too neat, too coincidental.
Another jab to the seat disrupted Joshua’s thinking. Then two more pops in quick succession.
Enough.
Joshua stood and looked over the seat back. Tyler, Joshua’s only friend in elementary school, was on the other side, a shock of dark hair sticking up from his scalp as though he’d rolled out of bed without combing it. Back when Joshua lived on the farm, they’d pretended to be Pokémon trainers in the hayloft and sorted their cards for hours under the willow.
As he got older, Tyler became lanky and lethargic, like growing his limbs took all his energy. By middle school, he’d lost interest in everything Joshua liked, including their friendship, but he’d never been particularly mean to Joshua, too nerdy to be the bullying type.
“Oh, hey, Ty. I didn’t see you,” Joshua said—not that seeing Tyler would’ve changed his behavior much. “Can you maybe stop doing that to the seat?” Joshua tried to sound like it was no big deal either way.
Tyler looked at the back of the seat, a few inches below Joshua’s face. Joshua sank back down.
Another knee, this one dug into the seat and held, the mound of brown plastic in Joshua’s spine.
“Dude, stop,” Joshua said, standing again.
Tyler looked out the window as though he hadn’t heard, as though Joshua were a ghost.
Joshua grabbed his bag and made his way toward the middle schoolers at the front.
“In your seat!” the bus driver yelled. Ruthie glanced at him. He rolled his eyes to signify that it was something trivial, like a fart, that had driven him forward, and she returned to her friends.
Joshua sat down next to a small middle schooler with cartoonishly large ears. He wondered if she was persecuted for them, like he’d been for his red hair and glasses and the rolls above his hips. He wanted to form a bond with this girl who was less than half his size, to tell her that superheroes were often persecuted at a young age, but even she sensed the pariah he was and scooted closer to the window, avoiding him.
Joshua felt exhausted, like he’d been trying to keep his skin as a barrier, trying to patch it and hold it up, but it was beginning to disintegrate and soon there would be nothing left to keep things in. Or out. Soon he’d really disappear.
Brenna went to the Taco Bell. Not that she expected Jane to show up. It was just her habit since school started, splitting cinnamon twists with her friends and leaning against cars in the parking lot. Amy was in detention, and Brenna couldn’t afford to waste money, so she sat at the picnic table outside, not eating, and picked at the brown rubbery material coating the metal. She pulled out a Faulkner paperback that had been in her bag for months and smoothed the cover. Maybe she could write an essay about it in Spanish—that would be an actual challenge. Screw Mrs. Berk. And screw Jane.
She’d do her own project.
According to the receipt tucked between the pages, the book was long overdue. She had probably checked it out with Colin at the end of last school year. In fact, everything in Brenna’s bag was there because of Colin. The menthol cigarettes. The emo lyrics copied on crumpled napkins. The papers marked with big Fs that reeked of his influence. Before Colin, what had she carried? She remembered the weight of one book—a fat tome called Blonde, a fictionalized story about Marilyn Monroe. She’d read that people ascribed all these personas to Marilyn. She was an innocent angel, a tease, a whore. No one gave her the opportunity to define herself.
The first time Colin had spoken to Brenna, it was a Friday, and she was sitting against the lockers beside Amy, that book in her lap. When Colin spotted her, there was a quick movement around his mouth and eyes, like he’d caught a smile just before it spread across his face. She’d noticed him plenty before. He was tall and slim with tight jeans and a red flannel shirt just like hers. His hair was curly, uncombed beneath a gray beanie.
“You’re Manny’s sister?”
“Yeah. Brenna.”
He tilted his head, considering this, and looked at the book in her lap. “Such a tragedy,” he said.
“I’m Amy,” her friend chimed in, though Colin never even glanced in her direction.
“You’re much prettier than Manny,” Colin said to Brenna. “And I can tell you’re smarter, too.”
Brenna laughed. “It doesn’t take much.”
The lines along his mouth moved quickly again, and Brenna was afraid that if she blinked, she’d miss his smile.
“I think you and I have a lot in common,” he said. “I’ll text you.” He walked away without asking for her number. Brenna’s skin tingled, as though he’d traced her collarbone with his tongue, but she laughed the feeling off and rolled her eyes at Amy.
The next day, Colin’s text woke her near dawn. He was outside her house with a carton of orange juice and two cans of PBR: a hipster’s mimosa. He smiled when he said this, and it wasn’t just the quick movement of muscles near his mouth, but a wide, sprawling thing, goofier than Brenna had expected, almost sheepish. They talked for hours that morning.
She learned that Colin had moved to Mercer when his father, an engineer in the Quad Cities, decided he wanted to build a house in the country. But beyond being transplants, she and Colin didn’t have much else in common. They had different skin colors in a town where you could count the families of color on one hand. He wore ripped jeans with ratty T-shirts and flannels intentionally—not because he had to. Not only that, but he read Malcolm Lowry and Hunter S. Thompson and Chuck Palahniuk—authors who were great thinkers and wrote about the world—not just relationships and domestic things like the authors Brenna favored. Colin spoke confidently about Islamic extremism and housing bubbles. He’d been to Europe and on college tours.
When Brenna talked about fights with her family or feeling misunderstood by teachers, he nodded. “What I hear you saying is . . .” he’d start, supplying an interpretation for her, of her. And while Brenna wasn’t entirely sure that was what she’d been saying, she’d trusted Colin’s vision of her. Soon she realized it wasn’t necessarily a vision of who she was, but of who she could be. It was a Brenna who could go to college on the East Coast, who could make something of herself—more
than her grandmother and family, more than her town, expected of her.
But what had Colin seen, exactly? An eager underclassman? A project? A way to piss off his parents? Brenna never knew. That was part of the power he had over her—an interest in her that seemed unfounded, that made her feel lucky. And all along, she’d had the sense that if she didn’t transform far or fast enough, he’d see through his own invention. It had taken a year, but she’d been right, and that fact made Brenna want to claw away her skin.
* * *
* * *
An hour later, when Brenna was certain that Jane had stood her up, she left Taco Bell and stopped at the cemetery on her way home to pull weeds around My Sky’s stone. Gretta, who’d lost one arm to her Ford pickup during the drive-in tornado, sat on a bench. She worked for Mercer’s landscaping company now, and was always in muddy overalls, galoshes, and coats with her left sleeve pinned to the elbow. She had wild, crimped gray hair and eyes sunken deep in skin the color and texture of a baseball glove. Her stump was as tan as her face, the scar tissue twisted like a balloon tie. She was famous for saying that her arm was already a ghost, that she could feel it on the other side, tugging at her. It was a rite of passage in town to ask Gretta to buy you a pack of smokes, the only price being one cigarette and listening to her story. Most were too spooked to talk to Gretta more than once, but Brenna was one of her regulars.
“Taking a break?” Brenna asked.
“Always,” she said, chuckling. “Who ya visiting, girlie?”
“My Sky.” Brenna pointed at the pink stone.
Gretta nodded and pulled a crushed box of clove cigarettes out of her denim pocket. She offered one to Brenna, who took it and leaned close so that Gretta could light it for her. The ritual made Brenna feel crumpled inside. Colin would always light her cigarettes, the scar on his thumb like a pink thread she wanted to wind around her tongue. While he smoked, he’d flick his lighter open and closed and go on about affordable health care and marriage equality and marijuana legalization.
“Did you know Celeste well?” Brenna asked.
Gretta took a drag, shaking her head. “I didn’t even know her name until she died. That’s when I figured I better get to know ’em all. Since I’ll be with ’em whenever my arm wins its tug-of-war.”
“You believe they’re really out there and interested in us?”
“Don’t you?”
“Yeah, but I just don’t get it. Why would they want to watch us?”
“If you were taken too soon, wouldn’t you want to watch what you’d left behind? The life you could have lived?”
“I guess.”
Gretta pushed her frizzy hair away from her face and blew smoke. “I hear them whispering more than most do, you know. I guess because I should be one of them.” She lifted her arm as evidence. “They’re always going on about wanting to come back and how it wasn’t their time yet. You know, all sorts of unresolved shit.”
This was Brenna’s opportunity to ask about what Callie had heard. “This girl said they were saying, ‘Find them. Save them,’ last night. What do you think that means?”
Gretta hmmmed with her cigarette in the corner of her mouth. “Couldn’t say, but it’s gotta be important. It’s the first tornado to touch down since 1961, and on the same date and practically in the same damn place. That’s enough to make you think something’s going on.”
It gave Brenna the chills to hear someone else mirror her own thoughts so closely. Someone with a connection to the tornado of 1961, no less.
“And that white car on the news,” Gretta continued. “I’ve definitely seen it before.”
“Really? Where?” Brenna asked, wondering about the VW as well.
Gretta twisted her hair and tucked it behind her ear. “High school. Maybe a parade or something.”
“You don’t think maybe it was just a popular model?”
Gretta paused for a minute. “You’re probably right.” Then she leaned forward onto her knees. “But we both know it’s all too coincidental.”
Again, Brenna felt herself shiver.
“And that”—Gretta pointed her cigarette at Brenna—“is why we’re here now. Waiting for ’em to tell us something.”
Yes, Brenna realized, that was exactly what she was doing.
WE THINK STORMS ARE BEAUTIFUL
We think storms are beautiful now. The pink hints of them in sunsets. The build of them—stone gray and solemn. Then the wild bloom. The greens and purples and yellows and blacks. The crashes, the bluster, the singing wind. But that’s not the only reason they are beautiful.
When it storms, our voices grow louder. Or maybe it’s just that the living are more likely to be listening. Usually, it’s the very old—those who long for us or who are close to joining us—who tilt their heads to the sky.
We shout then, wanting only to get our messages through, one last I’m sorry for . . . or I wish I’d . . . To our sisters and brothers, to our friends, to our parents and children—those we’ve left behind—we say, Remember us. We say, See us.
When they left the hospital, Callie asked Aunt Toni to drop her at home instead of cross-country practice; she wanted to be alone. Dr. Kennedy was probably with her parents now. She imagined what they were saying: that her mother was ready, that everything was as in order as it was going to be, that they wanted some time together chemo-free. It hardly mattered that no one had asked Callie what it was she wanted.
She walked the rooms of her house, which, though often silent, always felt alive. Her mother said it was because all the people passing through, back when it was an inn, had left a tiny bit of themselves behind.
Callie heard a knocking sound above her. Squirrels, she told herself again, but she knelt on the warm wood floor and closed her eyes, sending her thoughts to the squirrels, to the house, to the ghosts and the god she’d vowed not to believe in: Can you give my mother back? Just that tiny bit? So she can have spirit and life and breath a little longer?
Another knock interrupted her. This one at the front door. Callie’s heart raced before she discerned a person’s shape on the other side of the frosted glass. Maybe Leslie trying to figure out why Callie had left school early, skipped practice, and wasn’t answering her phone? Callie stood and peeked through the side window.
An old woman stood on the porch, her hair tightly permed so that her pink scalp was visible between the curls. Her nose was wide and flat, and she wore red-framed glasses and a floral-print dress that buttoned all the way up to her collarbone. A black leather purse that looked like a bowling ball bag hung over her elbow. The woman began to fiddle with the doorknob, as though hoping the door were unlocked.
“Excuse me,” Callie called through the door. “Can I help you?”
The woman looked startled and glanced behind her—as if Callie might be talking to someone else. When no one else appeared, she wrinkled her brow in the direction of the door. “Hello! Is that Cath?”
Callie felt a jolt at hearing her mother’s name, and swung open the front door. The woman’s irises were so blue, they reminded her of photos of the earth’s oceans when taken from space.
“She’s not home,” Callie said. “Do you want to leave her a message?”
“Me?”
“Yes. You’re here looking for her, right?”
“Oh yes. I am. I’m Ellie Vidal,” the woman said. “From the”—her eyes darted around as though looking for the rest of her sentence—“the historical society.”
Callie’s mom hadn’t been involved in the organization since she’d begun her treatment last year. A few of her friends still visited, but Callie had never seen this woman before.
“My mom is at the doctor,” Callie said. That explanation made her feel calmer and more in control, like this was a regularly scheduled appointment and not her mother’s kidneys failing, not her mother deciding to die.
�
��Oh, my poor timing! I was on an outing downtown with”—again, the woman glanced behind her—“St. Theresa’s. I just wanted to talk with her about registering this house as a historic place so that the state can assist in preserving it. It’s something I should have done years ago.”
Callie looked past the woman for the St. Theresa’s Assisted Living Center’s bus and its shuffling herd of elderly. The houses lining the square and the neighboring streets were quiet—except for the distant whir of a leaf blower. Two children played on the swings in the town square park, another few pretending to direct an orchestra in the band shell, their accompanying adults seated at picnic tables, engrossed in their cell phones. There was an antique black Chevy parked nearby, similar in design to the white car from the night before; the hood was wide and flat, the cab like a half bubble on top. But no bus.
“Maybe I could wait for her and you could show me the house?” Mrs. Vidal said.
“It’s actually not the best timing. Today is—” Callie tried to find the right words. The beginning of the end? A day I’ll replay for the rest of my life? Maybe there was no word for what today was except: “Bad.”
Mrs. Vidal frowned. “I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll definitely get out of your hair.” The purse dropped from her elbow onto the concrete. “Oh dear. Don’t ever get old, Callie,” the woman said. “You’ll be clumsy as all get-out.”
This woman knew her name too? Callie’s skin crawled, but she did what she thought her mom would want her to: she stepped onto the porch and picked up the purse.
“Thank you, dear. Can I trouble you a moment more for a water? Walking really takes it out of me these days.”
Callie looked down the street, half expecting her parents’ sedan. When it didn’t appear, she beckoned the woman to follow her inside.
Mrs. Vidal stepped over the threshold and inhaled, closing her eyes. “This house,” she said. When she opened her eyes, she blinked at Callie for several seconds like she couldn’t remember why she was there.