We Speak in Storms

by Natalie Lund

  “So besides stuff with your mom, anything new?” he asked.

  She knew Colin would think her expedition to the museum was childish, that her discovery was ludicrous. She held the smoke in and shook her head.

  “Mr. Forester still being a dick in gym?” He smiled, as falsely self-conscious and sheepish as always.

  Nodding, she passed the joint back. “I hear he is. I don’t have him this year.”

  Colin inhaled and tilted his head back, smoke curling out of his nose. Lanky, narrow-faced, with those charcoal eyes, he reminded her of a disheveled dragon.

  “Does Kahn still say, ‘If you’re bored, you’re boring’?” he asked.

  “Of course.” She took the joint out of his pinched fingers.

  “And Mrs. Castle still has her pink fanny pack?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Damn, I miss that place.”

  “Really?”

  He sighed. “My roommates suck. I thought part of being an adult was getting to do whatever you want, whenever you want, but I can’t because they’re always in the apartment.”

  “So you’d rather be living with your parents?”

  He shrugged. “At least they were too busy to care what I did.” His mom had certainly cared about Colin hanging out with Brenna, but she didn’t bother to correct him. He would probably say that Brenna was too sensitive. Colin reached out and encircled her wrist again, as though measuring it. His finger and thumb overlapped. He kissed her ear first, so softly, she wasn’t entirely sure it had happened.

  She’d forgotten how, exactly, kissing him felt, how it worked: teeth, tongue, saliva, lip pressure. The kiss felt new and familiar all at once. Her muscles clenched and relaxed, and there was a pulsing sensation in their wake, aftershocks.

  He cupped her jaw but quickly slid his palm along the side of her neck. Despite the pot fog forming in her mind, she was aware of how large his hand was against her neck, of how much pressure was being applied to her throat—something he’d never done before—but she couldn’t form any thought or feeling about this. It just was.

  With his mouth and hands, he pushed her downward and back, lowering himself on top of her. A rock dug into her scalp. She shifted and another knuckled her spine.

  “Ow,” she said.

  He kissed her harder.

  “Ow,” she said again, louder.

  “What?”

  “The rocks. And it’s too cold. Let’s go to the car.”

  He shook his head and looked around. He pulled her to her feet and pinned her against the crossbeams of the bridge, working his hips against her pelvis. He brought her hand down to the crotch of his jeans. The fabric was hot and grossly damp.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Not with her Person after so much time apart. They were just supposed to remember each other and slip back into their old rhythm. She wanted to make it better. She needed to. She wrapped her arms around his waist, bit his lip, and then sucked his neck. He caught her hand and put it back on his crotch, pressing her fingers against the teeth of the zipper.

  This pissed her off, but she pulled it down anyway, undid the button, and wriggled her fingers through the flap of his briefs. He moaned and she rolled her eyes to the bridge’s dark underbelly, trying to make out its structure as she moved her hand.

  He spun her so her back was to him and held her hip with one hand while snaking the other around her front. He hissed in her ear: “Just like you like it.” Brenna didn’t remember ever telling him that. Was this something else he’d invented for her? His finger was too insistent, too fast, like he was ringing a doorbell repeatedly. He sank his teeth into the lacy shoulder of her dress. It didn’t feel familiar, but maybe she was just remembering it all wrong, how good it had felt.

  She looked out through the crossbeams at the empty gray stretch of bike path, at the factory in the distance, and she realized—she finally understood—it wasn’t her he was fucking. It had never been her.

  * * *

  * * *

  Afterward, they walked back to the parking lot and stood beside Golden Girl awkwardly, Colin pushing up his ridiculously loose sleeves again.

  “It was nice to see you finally,” he said.

  “You saw me at Bean City.”

  His face went blank.

  “Yesterday morning, remember?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “‘Oh yeah’?”

  “What do you want me to say, Bren? Yes, I remember seeing you.”

  “You’re not—I don’t know—sorry for barely acknowledging me?”

  “I was with Tara. It would have been awkward.”

  Tara, so that was her name. Tara with the teeth. Tara the Midwestern blond. Tara. Brenna kept rolling it over her tongue. It was earthy, hippie, like granola and ukuleles. “Are you still?”

  “With her? I guess. Kind of.”

  “You guess? Gee, she’s lucky. Is that what you told her about me a few months ago? ‘Yeah, there’s this other girl I’m kind of seeing. I guess.’”

  He rolled his eyes. “Haven’t we been through this before? What do you want me to say?”

  “Let’s start with why you came on to me if you’re still with her.”

  “We’re pals, too, Bren. Or we were. I miss that.”

  Brenna wasn’t sure if it was the pot, but this struck her as hilarious. “Pals?” she snorted. “We were just pals for an entire year?”

  Colin pushed his sleeves up. She wished she had a pair of scissors to snip them off at the elbows. This image made her laugh even harder. Harsh, dry laughter, like heaving.

  “I should probably find my friends,” he said. He stuck his first two fingers together and waved them—a sideways salute or a misshapen peace sign. Whatever it was, it was wrong.

  Brenna sank onto the pavement, half laughing and half sobbing. She felt like a barnacle scraped off his hull, awash, at sea. But finally she was free.

  DETONATOR DOROTHY DROPPED

  Detonator Dorothy dropped out of school and started to work at the same diner as her mother. She said it was to help her mom with rent, but we wondered if it was to save money for a move to the Cities, for recording time, for a demo. Something her mom would surely hate.

  The early risers among us would order a short stack and Dorothy would swing by with a coffeepot—eyes blank, unseeing. The name Dot was printed on her tag, as if she were someone new. She’d hum, filling the saltshakers and ketchup bottles, and we’d remember the choir room, how lucky we’d been to overhear.

  Only a few of us were at the diner the day the stranger came in. He was brown-skinned and black-haired at a time when that was unheard of in Mercer. He wore a suit made of finer material than any of us had ever touched. When Dorothy hummed by with the coffeepot, he watched her, eyes glittering.

  The next time she passed by, he pinched the corner of her yellow sleeve between his thumb and forefinger. We watched her twist away from him and slam the coffeepot down on his table.

  The man flinched. “I—I heard you singing.” He spoke with a slight accent.

  Dorothy raised her eyebrows, a clear So what?

  “What song was that?” he asked.

  “Did you need more coffee?”

  He shook his head. “I’d just like to hear more.” When she stared at him in reply, he offered: “It’s my business.”

  “Your business,” she repeated.

  “I manage a band, Rock-a-Gals, that needs a new front girl. You interested?” He took a card out of his wallet, tapped it on its edge, and slid it to her. “Tomorrow. Three p.m.”

  We recognized the mistrust on her face, knew it came from her father, from Mr. Cannon. But she took the card and the coffeepot without answering, and swung by one of our tables—already back to her songs.

  The next day, at the close of her shift, she emerged from the diner
bathroom in a red crinoline skirt and heels. One of the busboys saw her pocket a paring knife—just like the one her mother had wielded the night her father had left—before hopping on the bus to the Cities.

  A few of us had been to Rock-a-Gals shows and knew Beth, the brunette with a red bandanna tied around her temples; Bex, the bleach-blond with tattoos; and Kitty, with thick eyebrows and faint black hair on her upper lip. On the record, they wore matching pedal pushers, white button-up blouses, and red lipstick. The fabric tugged across their biceps and chests, lean muscles built from carrying all the equipment and practicing in airless garages.

  None of us knows what happened except that she got the gig. But we like to think she auditioned as though she were alone in that cavernous choir room. Singing only for herself.

  The temperature dropped while Brenna sat in the parking lot, waiting for the River Bandits to finish their set. Her teeth were chattering, but she didn’t think she could move. This was where the sea had swept her, and this was where she’d be until something new scraped her loose.

  After the crowd spilled out, Dot finally appeared, her ponytail loose. She spotted Brenna and waved. Brenna was too depleted from her encounter with Colin, from the shivering, to confront a ghost, but she couldn’t run, either. She wondered if this was why the women in those horror films died—they were too exhausted by men, by trying to be what they wanted.

  “Hey, I looked all over for you,” Dot called. “Did you catch the show?”

  Brenna shook her head.

  “Oh.” Dot sounded disappointed. She sank down next to Brenna, unbuckled her Mary Janes, and kicked them off. “That’s the best feeling in the world, isn’t it?” she asked, curling and extending her toes over and over. Brenna wondered why they weren’t painted, like everything else on Dot’s person. The tiny pearl toenails seemed like the most human, most earthly part of Dot.

  “Are you dead?” Brenna whispered, stunned that the words had even made their way out.

  Dot rubbed her left ear. “What? Sorry, still deaf from the concert.”

  Brenna buried her head in her knees. She was too drained to explain, to repeat her question, to formulate new ones. “Never mind,” she said. Then Dot’s warm hand was on hers, squeezing. Who knew ghosts could be so warm?

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “I need a place to stay. Just for the night,” Brenna said, surprising herself again.

  “Aren’t you expected home?”

  “My mom kicked me out.”

  “Oh, Brenna. Why?”

  “For going to your concert last night when she told me not to.”

  Dot bit her lip and looked worried.

  It was a manipulative thing to say, Brenna realized. “Actually, it’s more complicated than that,” she corrected, rubbing her eyes with her palms. In the darkness, she felt nauseated, unmoored. “It was a mistake.”

  “Mistakes help us figure out who we are becoming,” Dot said.

  Brenna thought about that for a moment. “Was it easy for you?” she asked. “To figure out who you were becoming?”

  Dot laughed. “I’m not sure I ever got to become, but I did get to make something beautiful for a little while. Be easy on yourself, Brenna. Try going home and talking to your mom. I know you’re missed.”

  “How can you know that? You don’t know me.”

  “I do, actually,” Dot said, peeling away her false eyelashes. They curled in her palm like centipedes. “You’re an excellent daughter and friend. You’re strong and brave and smart.”

  Could Brenna be all those things if no one else believed them—least of all her?

  “What about this,” said Dot. “I’ll give you my address, and if going home doesn’t work, you can come to my house. Okay?”

  Brenna opened her eyes, and her vision of Dot was speckled with tiny bursts of light. She wasn’t a ghost but a guardian angel.

  * * *

  * * *

  At home just after midnight, Brenna made herself dry toast and sat at the counter. The lavender notebook was still in her bag. She fanned out the pages and tried again, this time somewhere in the middle in case it was simply the beginning that scared her.

  She wrote I don’t know what to write, repeating the sentence over and over until she’d filled that page and the next. Eventually, something relinquished its hold on her—Colin, maybe—and she wrote the words I’m not enough, except when I am. I’m not your love, never again. She imagined Dot singing them, her voice dusky and low, a mic held close to her lips.

  The gravel crunched on the driveway then, and her mother’s brakes squeaked: a familiar sound. Brenna closed the notebook.

  “Manny?” her mother called as she stepped into the living room.

  “It’s me,” Brenna said.

  Her mother’s footsteps were quick then, and, before Brenna could brace herself, she was wrapped in arms, pliable and warm and smelling of cinnamon. Her mother rocked her gently, lulling her like when they’d floated the Guadalupe River on inner tubes and Brenna had drifted in and out of sleep, sun-drunk and happy. Before her parents had split up, before the move to Mercer, before she began to think she wasn’t enough.

  Switch-quick, her mother pushed back and smacked Brenna lightly with her gas station visor. “I’ve been praying and praying. Where were you?”

  “You kicked me out.”

  “It was just an expression. You know that.”

  “It doesn’t ever feel like just an expression,” Brenna said. The truth was like cracking open a shell.

  Her mother put her hand on her chest, a pledge. “You can always come home, mija,” she said. “Hell, look at Manny.”

  “Manny’s your boy.”

  “So?”

  “Boys are the beloved.”

  Her mother smacked her with the visor again, playfully. “Where’d you get that idea?”

  “Everywhere, mami.”

  Her mother pressed her lips together and then nodded. “Boys really got it easier, don’t they?”

  Brenna smiled.

  “Speaking of boys.” Her mother cleared her throat. “I called Colin’s parents, looking for you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I was worried sick.”

  Brenna clamped her teeth so hard that pain shot into her jaw.

  “His mom said she hasn’t seen you in over a month. She was a real pendeja about it too. You still with him?”

  “No.” Brenna thought again of his lazy salute and that word: pals.

  “Ay, mi cielo.” Another rocking hug. “I’m sorry,” her mother whispered, mouth right against Brenna’s ear. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Brenna wiped her nose on her sleeve and shrugged. “I guess I thought you’d say I made a stupid mistake by being with him in the first place.”

  Her mother laughed and shook her head. “You’re right. You were too good for him. That boy was always saying our house smelled funny. Everyone knew he was an asshole. Manny, Amy, all of them.”

  “Amy?”

  “Yeah, she’d come into the station and we’d talk.”

  “You gossiped about my boyfriend with my best friend?”

  She squeezed Brenna’s shoulders. “What could I do? You weren’t talking to me.”

  “It’s not like you consult me on your boyfriends,” Brenna said.

  Her mother rolled her eyes. “Always you on the men I date.”

  “Well, they’re not exactly winners, are they?” Immediately Brenna wished she could suction the words back inside so she didn’t get smacked for real, but her mother just sighed.

  “I won’t apologize for living my life as I have. Sure, some men were mistakes, but it’s got to be okay to make mistakes, mija.”

  Brenna remembered the words she’d heard earlier that day. Mistakes help us figure out who we are becomi
ng, Dot had said.

  “When you and Camila tried talking to the Storm Spirits as kids, did they ever answer?”

  “The wind answered. But maybe that’s just their way. Why do you ask?”

  Brenna hesitated. Could she tell her mother about the Pontiac and the VW? About Dot and the others? She grew up in Mercer; she might even believe Brenna.

  But before Brenna could answer, her mother went on. “What’s that Shakespeare quote I always liked from Mrs. King’s class? ‘There’s more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

  Brenna thought about this. “So you think there’s even more than the stories Mercerites tell?”

  “There has to be. The universe is a big, big place.”

  It was comforting to think the universe was so big that Brenna could find a place where she didn’t have to wear her shell, where she didn’t have to perform, or shut off parts of herself.

  It seemed like years since Brenna had spent the night in the mysterious old car. “I need to sleep,” she said, already turning toward her bedroom.

  “Good night, Horatio.” Her mother caught her hand and squeezed it just like Dot had in the parking lot. And Brenna, who’d just an hour ago been sea-swept, now felt steady, anchored, home.

  Joshua woke to the garage door opening below his room. It was probably Lawrence headed to church, alone, like every Sunday. He wondered if the man felt lonely in the family he’d married into, where no one liked him except Joshua’s mother, and she was too busy or too disinterested to join him in the things he enjoyed: motorcycles and church and fast-food lunches. Joshua wasn’t as pissed at him as he’d wanted to be after he’d failed to defend Joshua in the hardware store. Even in the car on the way home, Joshua had simply pretended to sulk, crossing his arms and staring out at the cornfields. Whatever had softened him toward Lawrence before the encounter with Tyler was still there.