Tornado Weather

by Deborah E. Kennedy

  “Yoiks and away!” the geese honked at her from the banks of the Ranasack, the shallows choked with their feathers. “Yoiks! And away!”

  The instinct she’d been born with took over and flying felt like the one time Hector said it was okay to coast down a small hill on her wheelchair—the whir in her ears, the dip in her tummy, bugs whirling past, and sparks shooting upward—only now there was no dip and she could see the whole world in focus and as it was with her bulging yellow eyes. Fish, mostly, gleaming in the water and smooth bellied, but also coins in fountains and bugs in fur and shirt pins in haystacks.

  Daisy’s bird mother taught her how to find fish. She wasn’t at all like Daisy’s human mother, who had cradled Daisy and kissed her and sacrificed her own life so her daughter might live a little longer as a girl. The bird mother was never affectionate, but she was fierce and protective and made sure Daisy left the nest all in one piece. Daisy had had a bird father, too, a tall and much-sought-after male with a bright, impressive head plume and the orangest legs in the rookery, but both he and Daisy’s bird mother were eaten by a fox in Florida shortly after they’d migrated there, and now rumor had it that they were wolf cubs dodging bullets in Alaska.

  Daisy supposed she should have felt sadness when she and her brother found their parents’ remains, dropped bloody and fly-ridden at the base of a mangrove tree, but she’d never really cared deeply about them, was drawn to them only out of instinct.

  It was Hector she loved.

  Daddy, Daddy, stand up, she’d wanted so badly to tell him at the funeral and afterward when he didn’t get out of bed for weeks. It’s okay. I’m okay.

  But he couldn’t hear a spirit or a seed. He couldn’t hear a heron either. And anyway, by the time she thought to try to talk to him, it was time to leave. One night she was perching on her old wheelchair outside Hector’s house, kuk-kukking at his grief-dazed figure, and the next her bird mother was bullying her back to the nest to rest for the long flight south.

  Daisy had wished hard that she’d had her girl mouth so she could tell Hector all about her new life, thrill him with stories of near midair collisions and storms pounding through the trees and fish stabbed through the heart, about the rookery, how it looked like something out of a cartoon during the day but at night became a ghostly place filled with rustlings and howls and echoes. Weasels came out and slithered around the tree roots, licking their lips. Coyotes cried from the undergrowth, but herons didn’t worry about them. Too slow, too stupid. They worried about the weasels, and about hawks, too, and fishers, though they were rare. Still, Daisy hardly ever felt scared. She had a brother and a sister now. They hunted together and preened at the same time. Her brother had once been a Jersey cow, her sister a manatee. They loved to fly and looked beautiful doing it, their shadows on the ground straight and clean as arrows. They told Daisy her flying was coming along nicely. “You haven’t run into anything in ever so long,” they said.

  Daisy was no longer the rookery’s worst flier. On both of her migrations—first south and now north—she proved herself more like its fourth worst, behind a few young birds and one old-timer with a fishhook stuck permanently in his right wing. Fourth worst was good enough to get around, especially home in Colliersville where the currents were kinder than the Florida winds and there weren’t as many small-engine planes and kites to contend with.

  Daisy had worried about Hector all the Marco Island winter, and between flights to the shore and whole days spent up to her knees in sea oats, she pined for their old life of silly games and fattening food and bedtime stories. The rest of the rookery fwanked on and on about how winter in Florida was really the life. “Shangri-la,” they croaked, if you blocked out the noisy tourists and avoided the Burmese pythons, but Daisy couldn’t wait to get home, to Colliersville and the nests that waited for them there, stacked three to a tree and wide as her twin bed, only wild with twigs and tasty beetles and sometimes even fast-food wrappers and human hair, sluffed off in small piles from brushes and drains.

  On the flight from the island to Indiana, Daisy had finally told her brother and sister all about her human daddy. She hadn’t told them before because it was too painful, it was too soon, and she didn’t know them well enough, but now they understood and, in turn, they told her their stories.

  “I left a whole herd behind me when I was struck by a semi on a highway outside of Philly,” her brother said.

  “I’d just birthed a calf when part of my right side got chopped off by an Evinrude,” said her sister.

  “Life is so awful. It hurts so much,” Daisy told them, somewhere over Georgia. Georgia went on forever.

  “This is your first reincarnation,” said her brother, who in addition to a cow and a heron had been a tea rose and a butterfly and a beaver. “You get used to it.”

  Daisy thought she could get used to anything, just as long as she knew Hector was okay. Nothing else mattered. Not mating, not knowing where her next fish was coming from. All her instincts were trained on her daddy, so on her first night back in Indiana she took off for the Bottoms, eager to check up on him, to see how the seasons had treated him. Her brother and sister were surprised. Wasn’t she tired? Didn’t she want to sleep and sleep and sleep and maybe, when the sleeping was over, mate? But Daisy was adamant. She had someone to see. And so she set off, taking the same path the tornado had a year before, keeping her eye out for tension wires and geese, wind turbines and too-close-together trees. Route 20 was tricky but she didn’t mind and she didn’t look away when she spotted the Ferris wheel with the tree growing through. The rest of the Fun Spot was leveled, was nothing but planks of rotting wood and twisted nails, but the storm had spared the Ferris wheel for some reason and so she flew in and out of the uprights, gazing down on the spot where her girl body had lain for days and weeks, becoming air, becoming earth. She studied the damp, dead grass, saw a cornflower peeking through and an army of marching ants on their way home, fragments of a dead worm on their backs.

  Her bird brother and sister told her that every living thing, even slugs, worms, bacteria, were building on themselves all the time, layers like onion skin, and taking those layers into their next life, so she lingered. That Ferris wheel was part of her. She had the peeled paint in her blood.

  After the Ferris wheel came a brand-new shopping center wreathed in red, white, and blue bunting. Cows had lived there once and her friends Juan and Maria and Nina milked them in a big blue barn, but it was all concrete now and GRAND OPENING signs and lights on poles where seagulls perched. There were no cars yet, no consumers, just a lone man in a yellow hard hat strolling up and down the sidewalk making notes. Daisy pooped on him. By accident.

  And soon she was downtown. There was the high school sitting like a sprawling brick amoeba, its brand-new roof bejeweled with shining silver fans the shape of chef hats. Someone had set up a lemonade stand on the sidewalk. A sign declared, DAISY GONZALEZ MEMORIAL SCOLLARSHIP FUND. Tiara and Fikus Ward, Daisy’s bus driver, handed brimming Dixie cups to Tina Gonzalez’s former boss, the ugly beautician, and a girl with hairy legs and large, perfect breasts. Also to Basketball Juan, who had to put his basketball down so he could hold his lemonade. Daisy sighed over him. Juan, her buddy. Daisy wondered if he was lonely without her, without Nina, without Maria. All his friends gone so quickly.

  But then Juan and the girl with the hairy legs finished their lemonade and started tossing the basketball back and forth, back and forth. Bounce passes at first, then chest passes. Tiara yelled at them, said they sucked donkey balls, and ran in on the game, arms waving wildly. “You can’t play keep away from me!” she said. “I invented keep away.”

  Daisy kept on. Up Main Street and Beacon, over what was once Tony’s Pizza (the tornado took out that entire building) and was still the Hair Barn and Breeder’s Laundromat. Miss Kitty’s was boarded up. The tornado did that, too. There was a sign on the sidewalk that said FOR SALE. She swooped in over the spot where her human mother was killed and Daisy was
left without legs that worked. A rusty brown stain bloomed there still. A spider scuttled over it, and an old lady dodged it, careful to keep to the edge of the sidewalk. That part of town used to make Daisy and Hector sad. They drove around it if they could, gave it a wide berth, but Daisy looked hard at it just as she’d studied the spot below the Ferris wheel. In the end, it was just another layer. It had to do with history.

  That’s why it doesn’t matter if you get rid of the wheelchair or not, she’d wanted to tell Hector back when her transformation was just beginning. Stop torturing yourself. Let it rust or don’t. Take it to the Goodwill or bury it in the backyard. It’s all the same. Everything will be all right. You’ll come back as a giraffe or a big black dog and children will love you all over again like I did. Do you hear me?

  He hadn’t, of course. The problem was that even when given a body and a voice, the sounds that came out of her beak made sense only to the winged.

  Kuk-kuk, she’d told the stringy-haired woman on her way out of the courtroom. She said the same to the scruffy-faced man as two deputies shoved him into a police van. I forgive you. Forgive yourselves.

  Raa-raa, she said to the dog and the man with the belly. They no longer took long walks alone. They were always with Shannon Washburn now, Hector and Daisy’s Bottoms neighbor. Since the storm there was a lot of work to do around the house, Shannon’s house mainly, and they did it together, Shannon in her short hair and the man with the belly, repairing gutters and reattaching shutters and replanting plants, and the dog on the ground looking up. Be friends. That’s what Daisy meant. Be best friends. You know you want to.

  Aroo, aroo, she said to the mean girl who wasn’t really mean and who’d spent much of her summer dismantling backyard targets of the president’s face and stowing them in her garage behind some lawn furniture. The girl turned one of the targets into a painting. She slapped oils on, used watercolors to draw a version of history only she understood. She did not know she had it in her. When she was finished, the president looked surreal, beautiful, the leader of a free world. She showed the painting to her dad and he cried and put away his gun for the night. Aroo, arroo, Daisy said to the girl. Translation: You’ll get out of here someday. Don’t ask me how I know but I know. You’ll get out and you’ll do it on your own and no one will be able to take that away from you.

  Fwank, fwank, fwank, Daisy said to Shellie Pogue, her old sort-of babysitter, and the rest of the middle-aged white ladies drinking tea and knitting scarves in a bright farmhouse kitchen. Later, when the ladies gathered around a plot of earth under a broken treehouse, Daisy tried to tell them, The boy you love is fine. He’s okay. He’s not scared anymore. The women clasped hands and prayed. They didn’t understand her. No one did. She could no more reach them than she could have convinced the search team to call it off and go home back when there was still hope they’d find girl-her alive. All those fathers of other kids with their flashlights and hip waders and safety orange hats, all those mothers stapling flyers to telephone poles, then praying at night for poor Daisy Gonzalez and her dad, who, they thought sweetly, could really use a woman in his life. Now more than ever.

  Daisy took a left out of downtown and headed toward the Bottoms, flying first over Maple Leaf Mobile Home Park, whose sign, a year after the storm, still read MAP AF M ILE ME K. The absent letters were nowhere. It was as if they’d never existed. Even now, with the cleanup far behind them and much of the rebuilding effort finished, many of the Maple Leaf lots stood empty because the tornado had tossed the trailers into a nearby field and people who might have moved there thought there was something distasteful or unlucky about squatting in the same space as your friend who’d died when his closet fell in on him.

  The empty lots were like missing keys in an old typewriter. Daisy blinked at them and glided by the concrete plant spitting dust and a small patch of woods just starting to grow back. There was a line of new scrub and brush through the center, a Mohawk in reverse. Daisy wasn’t concerned about the woods. Nature would repair itself. It always did.

  She passed over the Ranasack Apartments, which even from the air were almost unrecognizable on account of the roof garden and clean lawn and new basketball hoops hanging over a recently blacktopped parking lot. A woman and her children were outside, covering the sidewalk in chalk pictures of flowers and hearts and trees. The mother carefully drew a hopscotch grid, and while the little boy went to find a rock, the girl ran her foot through one of the hopscotch squares and laughed at her mother’s frustrated face.

  When Daisy got to Hector’s little yellow house, the wheelchair wasn’t in its usual spot outside. In its place was a clean spot of green lawn. She perched instead on someone’s antique tractor, which gave her a good view of a long hall and a straight shot through to the living room.

  Daddy, she tried to say. It came out as Aroo. Aroo.

  What she saw shocked her, almost sent her toppling off the tractor seat. With her new eyes she spied Hector sharing his couch with the nice fat lady from the funeral, only she wasn’t as fat as she used to be, and a chubby man in a black T-shirt. They were watching a movie and laughing. Hector had a bowl of popcorn in his lap. Fizzy sodas crackled on the floor at their feet.

  Everything was as it used to be—the kitchen table covered in papers, the stove in used pots, the living room floor in books and magazines—but everything was different, too. The kitchen walls, which used to be white, were painted a brilliant yellow. The wood paneling in the living room was a light green, and the wheelchair, polished to an almost blinding sheen and pushed up against the north wall of the living room, held an earthenware pot of daisies—orange, pink, red, and blue. Hanging above the chair was Daisy’s kindergarten picture, framed with blinking Christmas lights.

  Daisy watched her human daddy and the two strangers for a long time. They were happy together, acting almost like a family would, touching one another politely and making sure everyone had enough to eat. Once in a while, Hector’s eyes would stray to the chair or the photograph and then he would put his big fist over his heart, sigh, and look down. When he did this, the fat lady would say something funny or point to the television, where a pretty woman in a fedora chased criminals in her electric car.

  Aroo, aroo, Daisy said, and for a moment nothing happened. Aroo, aroo, she said again, and all three of them looked up at once. They must have seen her in the gleam of the neighbor’s dusk-to-dawn light because their mouths went slack and fascinated. Humans often looked at herons this way. Daisy was used to it. The fat lady pointed at Daisy and whispered something to Hector and the man beside him. They stared for a while, their lips turning up in faint smiles. Then the lady tugged on the men’s sleeves and they rose very slowly from the couch, creeping down the hall in a huddle.

  The hall window was open and through it Daisy heard the lady shush the chubby man when his elbow dislodged Tina Gonzalez’s picture from the wall.

  “We don’t want to scare him,” the lady said.

  Daisy stayed where she was, by this time an expert at freezing in place. Him? She wanted to laugh out loud but that was the only downside to being a heron. Herons couldn’t laugh. It had something to do with dignity.

  Hector and his guests pressed their faces to the window screen to get a better look, and Daisy, knowing it was probably futile but unable to stop herself, tried just one more time to say what it was she wanted to say, to unburden her heart. Fwank, fwank, fwank! she said. I’m okay, Daddy. I’m fine. I miss you so much, but the skies are blue in my new life and when they aren’t blue I just fly higher. When you die, try and find me. Or I’ll find you and together we’ll hunt for Mom. By then I might be a cat, you might be a mouse, and Mom might be a bear. We might all be Christmas trees. Or sycamores. Or cornstalks.

  Be happy. Teach kids what you know. Give the mean girl a recommendation and a chance. Flunk Benny Bradenton because he has it coming. Forget about Marissa Marino. She can wait her turn. Forget about all the times you yelled at me, or grew impatient. They do
n’t matter either. Forget about leaving me at the bus stop to fend for myself. You did the best you could. You were the best daddy a girl could ever ask for. And just remember that I love you. I love you. I love you.

  Hector gazed out at her, unblinking, his face a melancholy mask. The fat lady covered her ears and screwed up her face. “Such ugly sounds from such a pretty bird,” she said, but the chubby man in the black T-shirt was weeping. Tears ran down his neck onto his shirt collar. He made small choking sounds like Daisy did now when her powder down caught in her throat.

  “I’ll tell him, Daisy,” the man said. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry anymore. I’ll tell him everything.”

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks are due first and foremost to Yishai Seidman, tireless advocate, rock star agent, and friend, and Christine Kopprasch, editor extraordinaire and chance taker. Also to Amy Einhorn and Caroline Bleek and everyone at Flatiron books. I can’t adequately express how grateful I am for your hard work, expertise, and passion.

  I would also like to thank my kindred spirits at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, too numerous to name here, so I’ll only say particular attention must be paid to Jill Logan, Susannah Shive, Sinead Lykins, and E. J. Fischer. I am deeply indebted to my Iowa workshop instructors as well. Benjamin Percy, Lan Samantha Chang, Kevin Brockmeier, Julie Orringer, Ayana Mathis, and Charles Baxter—thank you for pushing my writing into more challenging and, I hope, more truthful territory.

  Writing teachers and mentors come in many forms, and I have been lucky enough to study under, and learn from, the very best. All my gratitude to Jonathan Smith, Marsha Dutton, Kathy Barbour, Dee Goertz, Kay Stokes, Melissa Pope Eden, Peter Orner, Nancy Zafris, Kay Sloan, Keith Banner, Eric Goodman, Tim Melley, Jim Palmarini, Don Corathers, and Doug Driscoll.