by Natalie Lund
Dorothy’s cheeks flushed.
“Go on,” he said.
Dorothy made a choked sound. Mr. Cannon stopped playing and put one hand on her back and one on her abdomen. “Sit up straight. From here,” he said.
She moved like a trapped cat then: spastic and fast. When the bench didn’t budge, she toppled from it backward, twisting her torso and landing on her palms, then snaking her legs out behind her. She ran past, not even seeing us. Mr. Cannon, however, saw us and reddened.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked, a question everyone in town knew the answer to, including him.
We lifted our instrument cases, slammed our locker doors, and followed Dorothy. It was the least we could do.
It was still dark when Callie woke to the beeping of her alarm. She pulled on her cross-country uniform, the compression shorts looser than they’d been at the season opener over a month ago. The historical society’s book was on her nightstand now, but she couldn’t muster the excitement she’d felt in the cellar the night before. She tucked the book under her pillow.
When she went downstairs, she was surprised to find the light on in the kitchen, her father leaning against the counter with the newspaper.
“Happy birthday,” he said, and pointed at a banana in the fruit bowl.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Bodies are like cars, Cal.”
“You should change the oil every three thousand miles?”
He didn’t laugh. “They need fuel to run.” He pointed at the banana again.
Callie peeled it, holding her breath so she wouldn’t have to smell the sweetness. She tossed the waxy peel in the trash and remembered how her father had draped banana peels over his knuckles when she was little, pretending they were wigs for hand puppets.
Callie took a bite and tried not to gag. The banana was mealy and stringy all at once. She mashed it into paste with her molars and packed it against the roof of her mouth, where she didn’t have to taste it.
“Listen, I know this isn’t the best time to tell you this, but a realtor is going to come by tomorrow. A friend of your mother’s. She’s going to help me get the house ready for”—her father cleared his throat—“for sale. Your mom wants to be sure the house will be in good hands, you know?”
Callie opened her mouth to tell him she’d overheard them talking about it, but her voice was unable to push aside the boulder of an ache in her throat. The boulder was her mother looking for her: Is she in the closet? No, not in the closet. Is she in the bathtub? No, not in the bathtub. It was her mother calling come out, come out, wherever you are after Callie had wedged herself in the cabinet beneath the window seat or in the trunk in the attic or under the chaise or behind the curtains, her hand pressed over her mouth to suppress the giggles. Hide-and-seek could last hours if they wanted it to—the house had given them that.
The banister creaked just then, and Callie heard her mother’s huffing breath, her slow, shuffling steps. Her father tossed the newspaper on the counter and headed for the staircase to help. Callie pulled out a classified page, wrapped the remaining banana, and threw it into the trash.
She thought again of the videos of marathon runners who collapsed, faces slack. Callie imagined herself as a taut string, threaded from her feet to her hips to her shoulders to her ears. Singing through the air. The harder she ran, the more tension in the string, the closer to breaking. It’d be that simple: a pluck, a twang.
* * *
* * *
Callie finished second at the meet, just behind a long-limbed girl from Ottawa. She was light-headed from hunger—her thoughts in slow motion as though stretched through molasses. As she jogged a few extra meters to cool down, she imagined the string loosening again, coiling in her gut. She coughed and heaved a dribble of yellow liquid. It was the damn banana bite, she thought. If she’d been truly empty, she wouldn’t have failed at breaking.
Without waiting for Leslie and her other teammates to finish, Callie walked toward her parents. The night before in the cellar, she’d felt like she was moving toward something meaningful, but now, in the bright morning sun, that feeling was distant. Had she simply imagined it? Allowed the magic of the midnight hour to turn a coincidence into something the old Callie would have believed was significant?
Her mother wore an oversized jacket that hid how much weight she’d lost. She had on a high-quality wig Aunt Toni had bought her. It’s made from real hair, she’d said proudly, which made Callie shudder. The wig was a warmer brown than her mother’s had been, almost red. She looked like a normal mother with it on, just not Callie’s.
Her father handed her a bottle of water.
“What a birthday run,” her mother said. “You looked good out there.”
“That had to be your best time all season,” her father added.
Callie bent down, stretching her hamstrings. She’d go home with a plastic trophy, the coveted gold-girl runner, hair streaming, perched on top of a red marbled pillar. But she hardly cared. Win or lose, it was just an equation like any other. Callie ran the race at x speed. Her mother would die in y days.
Brenna awoke in the car, shivering, a cramp in her neck and a still-blank journal on her chest. The sky was yellow gray. Her phone was dead, but she guessed it was a little after six. The leather upholstery had grown warm around her, as though part of a living cocoon. She unfolded herself, stretched, and patted the seat. There was something special about the Pontiac Catalina, a presence that made it feel alive. Maybe the car itself had been pulling her. Maybe it had wanted her to find the name patch and understand something. But what?
The guard dog was awake at the other end of the lot, on its haunches near a dented food bowl. It was facing the trailer that served as the lot’s office, panting, its tail thumping occasionally. Was someone about to emerge? Brenna unlocked the car door, tossed her bag over the fence, and started to climb. She expected to feel the slippery enamel of teeth on her ankle or hear someone shout, but she landed safely and jogged away without looking back.
Two of her five dollars went toward a cup of coffee at Bean City. Brenna wrapped her hands around the hot cup and sat at the table where Colin and Same Life Stage Girl had been. She wondered what the girl thought about. Group projects? Roommates who refused to clean their dishes? Puppet dictators in Latin America? The social significance of hip-hop? Did all of that add up to a different life stage?
Brenna plugged her phone in.
No messages. Her mother was probably still asleep.
I need Golden Girl to go to the Cities tonight, she texted Manny. Don’t tell Mom.
Can you pick me up at Bean City when you get out of Saturday detention? she texted Amy.
She googled the owners of the VW, learning only that they looked like hippies and had bought the vehicle in the late nineties. Brenna took the name tag she’d found in the Pontiac out of her backpack to see if daylight offered more clues. It was white with a red border and had once been stitched to gray fabric. Other than that, it didn’t reveal anything new.
Bored, she took a pencil out of her backpack and pushed the lead into a creamy page. She couldn’t think of anything to write. Nothing but a dot for Dot. She sipped the coffee, which felt like it was burning a hole through her empty stomach, the rabid feeling replaced by hunger.
The barista, an older woman with silver hair and penciled eyebrows, kept looking at her and narrowing her eyes. Brenna could guess what the woman saw. The shredded jean hems. The ripped backpack. Her brown skin.
Just then Joshua walked into the coffee shop, looking sleep-rumpled, like he’d slept in his clothes too. His skater shoes were untied, his jeans just as ripped as Brenna’s.
“Hey,” Brenna called out, loudly enough that the barista glared. She’d never seen Joshua in the coffee shop before. First the school office, now here.
Joshua waved enthusiastically. At school she’d seen him moping around
the halls, tiptoeing as if he were trying not to make a dent in the world. Such yearning. She wondered if that was how she had seemed to Colin. Or to Dot. Maybe that was why she felt a connection with Joshua. Or maybe it was the tornado, the look she’d seen on his face as he pedaled up to her car. She’d recognized it: a desire to be someone, to mean something to someone else.
“What are you up to? Want to sit down?” she asked across the shop.
“My mom asked me to grab some cinnamon buns for breakfast.”
“Oh okay,” she said, trying not to sound desperately disappointed.
He placed his order with the barista and walked over to Brenna’s table to wait. She noticed him eyeing the empty notebook in front of her.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m just killing time.” His left eye had a shadow under it, a purple half-moon. “What about you?”
He looked confused for a moment. “Oh, the eye. Yeah, I’m fine.”
Brenna leaned across her table and whispered: “Did you hear they found the VW? It’s in the impound lot now.”
Joshua’s eyes widened. “No. Who was driving?”
“They don’t know.”
“No shit. Same as with the Pontiac?”
She nodded. “The owners are in California.”
“Could it be connected to the Big One?” Joshua asked.
“I think so,” Brenna said just as the barista called out Joshua’s order. He returned to the counter for the box of rolls. Brenna could smell the warm cinnamon and cream cheese frosting from her spot a few seats down. Her stomach groaned so loudly, she was sure the whole coffee shop had heard. She wished he’d stay.
“We should hang out. I have something I want to show you. Something I found,” she said.
Joshua’s eyes sparked with excitement, then fell. “Technically, I’m grounded.”
Brenna nodded and tried to hide her own disappointment.
“But I could probably get away with having you over for breakfast, if you want,” he said. “We could say we’re working on a project.”
Brenna couldn’t stop herself from jumping off the stool. Together, they could theorize about the VW, the patch she’d found in the Pontiac, the whispers. Together, it seemed, was how Mercer wanted them to be.
Brenna’s cinnamon bun disappeared before Joshua even had a chance to reheat his own in the microwave. She licked the cream cheese frosting off her fingers. He pulled down a cereal box and put it in front of her without saying anything. He hated when people pointed out how much or how quickly he ate. He watched her eat and wondered if she felt the bond between them—even though they had nothing in common except the tornado and living with just one of their birth parents.
She yawned, covering her mouth with one hand and digging into the box with the other. “Sorry, I slept in a car. The Pontiac, actually.”
It took him a moment to register what she was talking about.
“Wait, what? Why?”
“My mom kicked me out and I just had this weird feeling, like I should go to the impound lot.” She pulled out a patch stitched with the name Luke and handed it to him. “This is what I wanted to show you. I found it caught in the springs under the seat.” He turned it over. It was smeared with something black, like ink or grease that had been there too long to leave residue on his fingers. Joshua remembered the hole in his neighbor’s uniform, and the letter he’d stolen addressed to L. Could his new neighbor be this Luke? But these stains looked older, like the patch had been twisted in the springs for decades.
“Luke isn’t the Pontiac owner’s name,” Brenna said.
“Yeah, I read that. Did you see that the owner lived in Indiana but was originally from Mercer?”
She raised her eyebrows. “So how’d his car get back here?”
“Maybe Luke drove it.”
“Or maybe it was one of the owner’s family members. Someone was taking a trip back to Mercer and they got caught in the storm.”
“Why haven’t they come forward then? To get the car back?” Joshua asked.
“Maybe they didn’t make it. Died somewhere in the field. Maybe Mrs. Jenson and the other crows are eating them as we speak.” Brenna’s eyes were glinting in amusement.
“Maybe they stole it and don’t want anyone to know,” Joshua said.
“Maybe the car has a mind of its own.”
“Maybe it was a ghost driving.”
Brenna’s face grew serious. “I’d believe it. We should see if we can find out who Luke was. Research the owner, too.”
“That Edward guy? I already looked online. All I could find was his obituary.” It dawned on Joshua then. Could Edward be E?
“Maybe we could go to the society downtown. They have records and shit,” she said. “We could find out who he used to be. It’s like Mr. Davis says, ‘History always has answers,’ ya know?”
Joshua heard Lawrence’s and his mother’s voices above them. Their bedroom door opened, and her footsteps were in the hallway. She was coming down, which meant he was about to get a lecture. Joshua looked at the staircase, willing it to collapse so he could stay in the kitchen with Brenna a little longer. “I’m about to be reminded that I’m grounded,” he said.
“So what? I’m a runaway.” Brenna grinned. “Just tell them about all the research we have to do for our ‘school project.’” She made air quotes.
Joshua grinned right back.
WHEN WE WERE TEENAGERS
When we were teenagers, we loved to drive loops downtown with our elbows out the windows. We’d spot Luke bent over engines, hair damp across his forehead, face smeared with grease, his eyes on the firehouse next to his father’s shop. The potbellied volunteers would be sitting in the parking lot, playing euchre and fanning themselves with their cards like Southern ladies.
Before long, we realized it was Eddie he watched for. Eddie, who waxed the fire truck and greased the ladders and changed the filters, hoping, we were sure, that he’d be allowed to fight fires. Eddie looked like the kind of movie star we’d see at the drive-in. He was Golden, shining in a white tee and jeans. If it was cold, he wore a letterman’s jacket with three yellow Ms, each with two slim gilded bars. Varsity varsity varsity. His hair was corn silk, his skin the fall stalks. He was prince of pleasant valleys, of farms that draped like patchwork quilts across the Midwest. When he smiled, it was a little lopsided, a little Who—me?
Sometimes Eddie would sling a towel over his shoulder and walk to the garage. Luke would slide beneath the car or disappear under its hood, but Eddie was undeterred. Anyone who’d been in classes with him knew he could wax poetic about baseball for hours: the leather in his hands, the ribbed stitches, the scent of soybeans heavy in the air, the red dust clinging to his pants.
The less perceptive among us considered them unlikely friends: the greaser and the jock. But the rest of us saw it: the spark there. The way Luke’s eyes widened when Eddie came near, like a horse about to bolt. Eddie, who is among us now, saw it too.
Connie, Luke’s girlfriend, was the oblivious one. Luke had a habit of racing off to see her as soon as Eddie wandered back to his post at the firehouse. Connie whispered to some of us what happened on those nights: the steamed car windows, her hand on his cock, her mouth on his neck. And him still wanting more, more, like nothing was enough.
When Eddie’s dad gave him the Pontiac, we all salivated, circling it with our fingertips brushing the paint. Eddie would pop the hood and we’d make appreciative sounds, though we didn’t know much about cars. Only Luke did, and so we looked to him, waited for his reaction. But he only grunted when Eddie waved him over.
One day Eddie said: “Something’s off. Can you take a look?” Luke, skittish as always, took a step back from the proffered keys. Our chins dropped. If they’d been offered to us, we would have snatched them from his fingers.
Finally Luke took
them and Eddie slid into the passenger seat and they were off, fast, toward the empty countryside. We knew this drive into the sunset was only the beginning.
Callie climbed into the driver’s seat, hugging the historical society’s book and the paper license she’d been temporarily issued. Now she could drive without her parents. Now, when she was losing her mother anyway.
The car smelled like her—not the old smell, but the new, nauseating one. Earlier, she’d been asleep in the passenger seat, gurgling that smell into the upholstery while Callie and her father waited in line at the DMV. She’d woken up when they’d returned to the car, but had been unable to complete her sentences, repeating happy over and over. Callie wasn’t sure if she meant Happy birthday or I’m happy for you.
Callie’s phone buzzed in her pocket and jolted her to the present. It was Leslie, whom she’d managed to avoid at the meet. Ready for birthday fun? Followed by another: Meet me at Giovanni’s in an hour!
Callie looked at the time—it was two thirty—but didn’t respond, her father’s rules about texting and driving ringing between her temples. I don’t want you to become one of those PSAs, he’d said once. Listening to this one rule was the least Callie could do.
At the museum, she parked on the street and tucked the book under her arm. She wasn’t sure exactly what she intended to do there. Find out if Mrs. Vidal and Celeste were related? Find out if the Pontiac she’d seen in the photo of the 1961 storm was the same as the one she’d seen the night of the tornado? It was just an excuse not to think about her mother—like everything she did now.
The docent, Mrs. Greenley, greeted her warmly. Callie knew her from every elementary school trip they’d taken, where she’d repeated the tale of the poisoned Winston twins, who loved to smash china and had grown up in the house now occupied by the museum. She was unchanged, her back curved like a shepherd’s hook, forcing her to crane her head upward. It made Callie want to roll her shoulders back and stretch her own neck.