We Speak in Storms

by Natalie Lund

  Joshua kicked off his covers and checked his phone.

  A group message from Brenna, sent after midnight: Long story but I didn’t get to ask Dot a lot of questions.

  Callie hadn’t responded.

  Joshua typed: I’ll get to mine today.

  He pushed aside his blinds, and cold air seeped through the window cracks. Fall, when it finally arrived, felt like catching your breath.

  The house across the street was still—not that he’d seen any movement since Friday. Joshua pulled out his sketchpad and thumbed through. When he came to the Wolverine drawing, he picked up his pencil. He darkened the lines of the animal legs, shaded fur and tendons, and then drew black claws at the end of each splayed toe. The legs were bent mid-spring, as though he were leaping off the car. It was one of his best drawings, he thought.

  “Joshy?” his mother called, knocking.

  He snapped the pad closed, his heart beating fast, as though he’d been caught masturbating. “Come in.”

  She swung open the door and leaned against the frame, appraising his room.

  “I know, I know,” he said. “I still have to clean.”

  “And rake. Did you do anything after our talk yesterday?”

  “I ran to the hardware store with Lawrence.”

  “I heard. He said you were helpful.” Joshua listened for sarcasm, for an indication that Lawrence had tattled on him yet again, but she seemed sincere.

  “Where you heading off to?” he asked, looking at her floral dress.

  “Nolan’s baby shower,” she said, patting her hair. “These chores will be done when I get back?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She pursed her lips like she was going to say more, like another scolding was on its way, but she just nodded instead and closed the door.

  Joshua slid the stolen love letter into his pocket, kicked his laundry pile into the closet, and shoved old worksheets, notebooks, and a few textbooks into his backpack. He straightened the covers on his bed. It looked clean enough.

  The garage door closed below, and Joshua peeked out the blinds as his mother backed down the driveway.

  Downstairs, Ruthie was on the tweed couch with her headphones in and a history book open on her lap. “I’m going to rake,” he called.

  She pulled out one earbud and raised her barely there brows.

  “I’m going to rake the yard,” he repeated.

  “Why are you telling me, red ’stache?”

  “So you know I did my chores in case Mom asks later.”

  She narrowed her eyes, zooming in on him. “What’s really going on?”

  “Mom’s mad, so I have to rake.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Ruthie waited for Joshua to respond. But he didn’t. “We talked Friday morning, remember? The same day the school said you skipped.”

  “I told you: I was helping the guy across the street.”

  “What guy?”

  “Our new neighbor!”

  “Who are you talking about? No one has lived in that house for months.”

  So Ruthie had never seen him. Had anyone else? “Well, there’s someone now,” Joshua said—less firmly than he would have liked. He didn’t want to let her in on his secret. “And I was helping him and just lost track of time.”

  “Should I tell Mom that?”

  “Why would you?”

  “It seems like it might be important.” The tone was flippant, a challenge, but she looked worried.

  “It’s not. Just stay out of it, okay?”

  Ruthie gave him a mischievous look. “What are you going to give me?”

  “My undying affection?”

  “Allowance this month and next.”

  Joshua rolled his eyes, but he was nervous. Ruthie was sharp and loyal enough to their mom to tell. And what would his mom do if she found out how he was spending his time? He couldn’t risk it.

  “Fine. But this month only.”

  “Deal. Pleasure doing business with you.” She smirked and pushed her earbud back in.

  Joshua headed to the garage.

  In the car on the way home from their Sunday grocery trip, Callie wanted to say something to her dad: to make promises and swear to be a better friend and daughter and agree to go to counseling, as he’d suggested after the birthday party. She could feel his anger, compressed, in the small space of the car, but she couldn’t gather the oxygen, couldn’t arrange the syllables. She was still exhausted. She wasn’t sure how long she’d sat outside the pizza place the day before, after her dad left. At some point, she’d gathered herself enough to drive home, to climb the stairs, to drop into bed.

  Before they left for the store that morning, her father had stood watching while she gagged down toast and jam for energy. She threw it up moments later in the bathroom. It was the first time she’d done that, and she sat in the car, rolling the word bulimic around like marbles in her mouth. It didn’t seem to describe her. This, her emptying, was something else entirely.

  Now, before they stepped over the threshold of their house with their grocery bags, her father inhaled, squaring his shoulders like he was gathering the courage to go in. She thought she could see his face setting, a key turning, weights adjusting.

  “I’ve got to vacuum,” he said. “You put away the groceries and go see your mother.”

  * * *

  * * *

  When Callie arrived upstairs, her mother was reclining in bed, earbuds connected to her phone on the nightstand. Reading tired her out too much now, so she listened to podcasts and audiobooks with her eyes glazed over. Callie could never tell if she was awake and listening, or if she used the podcasts as a way to check out, to empty herself, like Callie.

  “Mom,” Callie called softly. The glaze receded and her mother’s eyes opened wider.

  “I didn’t hear you guys come home,” she said. She shimmied into a sitting position, the scarf loosening until its tail dangled beside her ear like a stray piece of hair. If it had been hair, Callie would have reached over and brushed it away. Now she couldn’t make herself touch the green fabric, for fear of brushing her mother’s skin accidentally, of feeling that coldness again. She thought of the anguish in her father’s voice the day before. Open, she reminded herself again.

  “I never got a chance to ask you how the party was yesterday,” her mother said, patting the bed beside her. “I really wanted to go, but it was that or the meet, and, well, you know how much I miss being outside.” Then she laughed. “I wish I could say I missed pizza, too.”

  “It was okay,” Callie said, perching on the edge of the bed. Below, she heard the vacuum switch on. The roar moved quickly, rumbling over rugs, whining in corners, like her father was communicating his anger through that, too. “I was late. I sort of forgot.”

  “Oh, Callie. You didn’t forget. You just didn’t prioritize friendship.” The lessons again. “Parties aren’t just for the person being celebrated, you know. You need friends like Leslie when things like this happen.” She gestured at her body, a lump under the comforter.

  Callie felt shame, dull and gauze-wrapped, but there all the same. And then the question Callie had avoided asking—how long?—bolted off her tongue, like it had been waiting for shame to clear its path.

  “Dr. Kennedy said a month maybe,” her mother said quietly. “But it could be much faster. We need to prepare for it to be faster.”

  Callie remembered her father saying that same phrase—We need to prepare for it to be faster—when he’d sat her down about the terminal prognosis last winter. She had just returned from a run. The kitchen was overheated, and she’d kicked off her shoes, peeled off her track pants, and stood in her spandex shorts, listening to the house.

  Her father came down the stairs, and she’d been aware of something slightly different about his face, something off—though maybe that m
emory had been reshaped later, after she was asked to sit on the kitchen stool, her shorts slipping on the lacquered wood. He stood across the island from her and told her they’d determined chemo and radiation would only help to lengthen her mother’s life—maybe as much as a year, but that they should prepare for it to be faster. He and her mother had decided, given Callie’s age, that another year was worth the discomfort of treatment. Callie wondered now if they felt the same way, if these past ten months had been worth it. Especially since Callie had spent them emptying herself of everything, including her mother.

  “Where’s Mom?” Callie had demanded at the time, words that felt like an ice pick in her throat.

  Her father had calmly explained that she was on a walk, that she’d asked that he be the one who dealt in bad news from now on.

  Callie shook her head. “No,” she said. It was a no to her mother’s walk, a no to her father’s calmness, a no to the cancer.

  Then Callie heard the familiar jingle of her mother’s many key chains and the door swung open with a thwack. Her mother stood in the threshold, knocking her boots against the doorframe, snow falling onto the mat. She was flushed from the cold, hair full of static from her hat. Callie ran to the door and threw herself into her mom’s arms. Her mother stumbled backward and then regained her balance, still strong enough to hold her daughter. And then she laughed, like laughter was the only logical response to the inevitability and hopelessness of it all. That was the exact moment that Callie had begun to build cocoons around her feelings, to empty herself of them.

  Only a few days after the announcement, Callie’s mother initiated the daily talks. The first being, what to expect when your mother is dying. Callie had counted the intricate plaster designs on the ceiling, wondered at their floral patterns, who had made them and why.

  * * *

  * * *

  Now, ten months later, she still didn’t have the answer, but something inside her was loosening.

  “What do you think will happen after?” she asked.

  Her mom smiled sadly. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll become a beautiful mourning dove—I’d rather that than an ugly crow like Mrs. Jenson. And I’ll sing to you from the window, be your early bird.”

  “How early are we talking?”

  “Hmm. Four or five a.m.”

  Callie laughed—an easy laugh that reminded her of laughing beside Joshua and Brenna in the historical society basement. Her mother smiled in reply.

  “Mom, you don’t know a Mrs. Vidal, do you? From the historical society?”

  Her mother frowned and shook her head. The confirmation made the skin on Callie’s forearms buzz again. The little germ of belief that had reawakened the day before was pushing its way through the soil. This strange woman might truly be related to both of the tornados that had struck Mercer.

  “She said Lincoln stayed in this house. And I found an illustration of him here, back when it was an inn, in that book the historical society made.”

  It was the first time Callie had seen her mother’s eyes light up in months. “Really?” For once, Callie felt something too. She jogged to her room and returned, carrying the book she’d found in the cellar in front of her like a gift.

  She climbed back into the bed, this time allowing herself to sink against her mother’s shoulder. Callie flipped through the book and pointed at the sketch of Lincoln.

  “Look at that,” her mother said, her voice soft. “It sure is our house. I can’t believe I never noticed that before.”

  “We’re a part of history.”

  Her mom smiled. “Let me show you something.” Her mother flipped to the final chapter, “The Future,” which discussed planned renovations to the town park and the building of a new middle school—projects that had since been completed. “Do you recognize anyone?”

  In one of the photos, there was a girl playing in the park’s sandbox in a purple corduroy jacket—a jacket that was probably stored somewhere in the cellar beneath them. Callie’s hair was blonder back then, and she held something blurry and red above her head, menacingly almost, as though she were about to strike the ground hard. Callie knew that her mother must have been the one taking the photo, sitting on a nearby park bench, her hair still long, her face much fuller.

  Callie wrapped her arm around her mother, trying to make up for all the skipped or stiff hugs in one squeeze. With her other hand, she put a finger on the photo, holding herself and her mother in that moment forever.

  When Brenna awoke later that Sunday morning, she thought of Colin, his stupid sleeves and his stupid salute, which made her blood boil all over again. Then she thought of Dot. Of writing in the notebook. What relief it had been. The night before, Dot had all but admitted she was a ghost: I’m not sure I ever got to become.

  Brenna dressed, layering her flannel with a hoodie, and knocked on her mother’s door to tell her she was running an errand.

  * * *

  * * *

  Dot’s address was near the church Brenna’s grandmother attended, on a street lined with maples flaring red and orange. Her home was a blue warehouse muraled by street artists. Brenna wandered around the building, looking for a normal door, but there wasn’t one. She knocked on a tin garage door.

  “Who’s there?” Dot called.

  “It’s Brenna. I hope it’s okay I’m here?”

  The door slid open. Dot stood beneath it in the same clothes she’d been wearing every time Brenna had seen her. Her hair was grease-glossy and pillow-flattened, her makeup nearly gone. In the morning light, she appeared younger—maybe a year or two older than Brenna at most. And underneath the remaining powder, there were hints of bruises, a yellow thumbprint above the bridge of her nose, a plum crescent under her right eye. Were they bruises from the tornado?

  “You’re always welcome,” Dot said. Brenna stepped into a dim space and Dot lowered the garage door behind them. What little light there was filtered in through two rectangular windows near the roof. If this was going to turn into a horror movie, the location was perfect.

  “I don’t have electricity,” Dot said, using a lighter to ignite a candle. “Sorry if it’s a little chilly.”

  The loft was empty of furniture except for a bare air mattress and a beaten recliner, its chocolate leather scratched away in patches, revealing salmon-pink material below. There was a guitar scarred with holes, resting on a stand, and sheet music fanned across the floor.

  “You just moved in?” Brenna asked, sinking onto the edge of the air mattress. It dipped under her weight.

  Dot nodded and sat on the floor, her knees folded to her chest. “I just found this place abandoned. And it’s perfect.” She sighed. “This is the life I’ve always wanted. A musician’s life.”

  Dot’s assurance in who she was and what she wanted was striking. Could Brenna just start calling herself a writer? Would that be enough?

  “Everything went well with your mom last night?” Dot asked.

  “Yeah. Thanks for making me go home. I was in a bad place.”

  “Just stuff with your mom?”

  “That and”—Brenna swallowed—“I slept with Colin. The boy you saw in the Jeep that day we met.”

  “Oh yes,” she said knowingly. “Are you okay?”

  Brenna shrugged and nodded at the same time. That scraped-free feeling in the parking lot had felt like a big, albeit painful, step toward okay.

  “I started singing and writing music because I had this storm inside,” Dot said. “Because sometimes it hurt so much that it was hard to go on. When one notebook was filled, I started the next. I needed an outlet, a way to express myself. You have to let yourself out, Brenna.”

  “I’m trying. I started writing last night.”

  Dot grinned. “What’d you write?”

  “Lyrics maybe. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t always know right away either,”
Dot said.

  “But you figure it out?”

  She smiled. “Usually.”

  Brenna took a deep breath, readying herself for the confirmation she needed. “Dot, I found a picture of you in a yearbook. You’re Dorothy Healy. Right?”

  At her name, Dot’s eyes welled with tears. “I was,” she said softly.

  Brenna swallowed a few times, hoping to calm her stomach. The truth—admitted so freely—made her feel nauseated, even after years of believing in whispering spirits and ghost birds. “Was?”

  “I have Dorothy Healy’s memories, but I have everyone else’s, too.”

  “What do you mean everyone else’s?”

  “There are many of us—those who died that night, during the tornado, and those who died on other nights. It’s hard to keep yourself straight, to be who you were before.”

  “But what are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know. Trying to be a musician? That’s what I was doing before the storm. The purple notebook was supposed to be for my next chapter with the Rock-a-Gals. But when I saw you in the parking lot last week and you saw me, I felt like there was some other reason I had it with me, some other reason I was back.”

  “Something to do with me?”

  Dot nodded. “Before, when I was—beyond—I’d watch you and think, How dare they make her feel like less and that her life doesn’t have value? It took me so long to realize that my life was valuable, that I was worth more than what everyone thought they knew about me. I wanted you to have a better shot than I did.” Brenna remembered lying on her bed while the tornado approached, how she’d yearned to be known and remembered like the Storm Spirits, a story lit blue. Even though it was only days ago, Brenna felt like she was remembering someone else’s history.

  “And music helped you realize all that?”

  “It did.”

  Brenna was calmer now, her heartbeat slowing. “I wondered if the two tornados were connected,” she said. “Especially after the old cars they found.”