The Gone Away Place

by Christopher Barzak

  The months that followed felt so natural and easy. So when he showed me this other side of him during our argument about Ingrid—this dismissive side I couldn’t stand in guys, this side he might as well have topped off with something like “Come on, baby,” it was so sexist—I just got up from the couch and left, ignoring his calls from behind for me to stop, to wait.

  I refused to answer his texts later that night, even though they buzzed at regular fifteen-minute intervals, my phone lighting up with pleading notes for me to talk to him, until finally my phone stopped buzzing around midnight.

  The next morning, we continued the argument in the school parking lot. It was a replay from the day before, except worse. More heated. Because, overnight, Noah had gone from feeling guilty to feeling angry, and he was trying to turn the argument into one about my flaws and faults, rather than solving the problem that had set us fighting.

  He said, “You’re so heartless, Ellie.”

  I scoffed and shook my head. “What are you even talking about?” I said.

  “This,” he said. “You. Right here. How you’re acting right now. Like you’re…”

  He hesitated, but I could tell whatever he wanted to say was on the tip of his tongue, so I pushed him to say it. “Like I’m what?” I said, feeling all the muscles in my face tense up as I waited for whatever he was holding back.

  “Like you’re so above everyone,” he said. “Like you can’t do anything wrong. Like you’ve got to have everything exactly the way you want it. Your way or the highway. I can’t stand it.”

  I stood there, mouth gaping, thinking, Who is this guy? And when I realized that we weren’t going to resolve anything—when I felt like, This is it, we’re probably breaking up—I said, “Whatever, Noah. Call me when you’re able to see me for who I really am.”

  I got into my car, slammed the door, and took off without any particular destination in mind. I just wanted out of there. I wanted to cool off. But for the next hour, as I drove around side streets and back roads, chewing my bottom lip, I grew angrier as each minute passed without a text from Noah. The message could have been anything. It could have been simple. It could have been I’m sorry. I didn’t mean those things. I just blew up because I don’t want you to be mad at me. I love you.

  When nothing like that came through, though, I decided I couldn’t go back to school like I’d planned to. Not without Noah giving me some reason to turn back in his direction.

  Instead, I drove to the outskirts of town, taking the winding dirt road that led up to the Newfoundland Lighthouse.

  The Newfoundland Lighthouse isn’t a true lighthouse. It’s really just an old tower that looks like one. It’s a replica of a lighthouse that the founder of Newfoundland, Ephraim Key, had built back in the mid-1800s, before moving his new wife to this patch of earth he’d claimed. She’d been the daughter of a shipping merchant in Boston, and was used to standing by a lighthouse near her childhood home, watching her father’s ships come into shore. Ephraim Key had the lighthouse built as a wedding gift, so that, when she arrived, she’d have something in this oceanless place to remind her of home.

  It was a story I’d loved ever since my mom first told it to me when I was a little girl and had asked her how I’d know if someone really loved me. “That’s how you’ll know, Ellie,” she’d said when she’d finished the tale, pointing to the lighthouse on the hill in the distance. “You’ll know by the great lengths they go to for you to feel like, wherever you are, as long as you’re with them, you’re home.”

  Noah and I used to go up to the lighthouse, usually after a date when neither of us wanted to go home, but neither of us had a place where we could be alone together, either. A lot of people used the lighthouse for the same reason, but no one ever disrespected the place. It was always left clean and undamaged by anyone who used it. The only time I ever saw the place cluttered with anything, it was in autumn, when brown, papery leaves would float in through the open windows and collect in piles on the lantern-room floor.

  After I arrived at the top of the hill, I got out and walked up to the door of the lighthouse. I squeezed its old-fashioned handle, and it opened on squealing hinges. Ahead of me, a stairway of worn-down stones spiraled up, and I followed its pathway until I came to the circular lantern room at the top. A large, old oil-based lantern stood on a pillar in the center of the room. It was empty now, but the town lit it once a year, on Newfoundland’s Founder’s Day, when you could look up to the lighthouse and see its orange beams reaching into the night. I went to the lantern and stroked a line of dust off its glass, then sat down with my back against the pillar and watched the sky through the windows around me.

  It was a hot, humid day. It was a day that felt more like the middle of August than May, really. I didn’t think about any of that right then, though, because I was still so furious, and nothing else could take up even a sliver of my attention. I was that focused on being angry. If I could have, I might have noticed how the mild morning I’d woken up to had quickly disappeared over the past couple of hours, and how my shirt had begun to stick to my back as the temperature rose and the air turned thick with humidity, almost rippling with particles of water. If I could have stopped being angry for even a moment, I might not have given in to my burned-out feelings and fallen asleep at the base of that lantern in the Newfoundland Lighthouse while a storm began to brew around me.

  Sleep is what I fell into, though. And when I woke an hour or two later, it was to the sound of metal scraping and sirens blaring; it was to the sound of something like a train roaring; it was to the bits of dirt and twigs and young leaves that flew in through the open windows to strike my face before they were taken up again by the wind and blown out another window.

  I rubbed my eyes and pulled myself up from the floor, looked around for my phone. The screen was filled with texts—from my mom, my dad, from my friends, from Noah. Where are you? Are you safe? I tried texting Mom back first, but the text didn’t go through. It was frozen in time, suspended between my phone and hers.

  The scraping sound that filled my ears continued to grate, though, and I crawled to one of the windows to see what I could make of it. And once I stood at that window, what I could make of the noise—what I began to comprehend very slowly—was this:

  The end of the world had started while I lay sleeping.

  From high on my hill in the lighthouse, Newfoundland drifted in a dark haze below me. The sky was the color of a fresh bruise, and when lightning flashed across it, the town hall and the school and the grocery store and the public library stood brightly lit against the horizon, all where they were supposed to be, at first making it seem like this was just another ordinary storm. It wasn’t ordinary, though; it was nothing near ordinary. It was a storm that grew larger and larger as I watched. It was a storm that stirred the wind faster and faster, until suddenly and, finally, on the far side of town, the source of the roaring and metal-screeching noise appeared.

  What looked like a twisting spire of smoke suddenly came into view on the horizon. A tornado, I realized. Only one, I first thought, as I watched it move across the fields, bending every now and then like the flame of a candle. Then a second spire appeared, seeming to pull away from the first, as if it were some kind of nightmarish, self-replicating creature. And when a third came into view, erupting out of the blackness in the distance, I realized I had started to cry. I stood there and felt the tears, hot on my cheeks, rolling down and down as I watched the three funnels circle one another. Slowly at first, then gathering speed, like a carousel, and pulling closer to each other, until they merged into one enormous monster, tearing through the woods and chewing up trees as they moved toward Newfoundland’s downtown.

  Meteorologists later said it took no more than fifteen minutes for the tornadoes to destroy the town, but it felt like an hour. And I saw it happen. I saw it all. I watched as transformers blew up on the grid
of the lampposts, one after the other, lighting the posts on fire afterward, making them look like strange torches in the dark of the storm. I watched as bricks were plucked from their mortar in the town hall, then the library. I watched as the roof of the high school’s gymnasium was peeled back like the lid of a can, and what looked like sports equipment was sucked out, with the bricks and tree limbs, whirling in the air. I watched as parked cars were pulled down the street, tumbling end over end like dry leaves in the wind. I watched and watched and watched, unable to tear myself away from the act of watching, as if I had to be a witness, as if the storm needed me to see it.

  And I continued to watch even as the wall of black came closer to the lighthouse, roaring louder in my ears, until I clamped my hands over them and fell on my knees, defeated, but still watching.

  In the last seconds of what I thought would be the end of my life, the tornadoes became distinct to me. They hadn’t formed into one funnel, as it had at first seemed. They were circling around one another, in unison, but still separate entities. Then one broke away and turned toward downtown again, while the other two hovered below me, as if they were trying to make a decision. They would take me with them, I thought. They would rip me out of the lighthouse like they’d ripped bricks and scaffolding into the air, and they would destroy me.

  But instead, they turned away like the first one had, as if rejecting me. One girl in a lighthouse wasn’t worth their time, I supposed, not when so many others waited, cowering before them.

  It was then, as the two spires turned toward the center of town, that something large and round, like the top half of a silo, went flying out of the whirlwinds, hurtling into the west wing of the high school, where it seemed to explode like a missile. There was a blinding flash of light. Even from as far away as the lighthouse, I could feel the aftershocks. They were so forceful, I was knocked backward onto the stone floor and hit my head. And then I was out, like the proverbial light, until hours later, when I rose and saw that the sky was an impossibly perfect blue again and, below me, Newfoundland was gone.

  I was on the phone with a client when I heard what sounded like pebbles striking the windows of my house. Then, from overhead, a thudding on the roof. For a moment, I stopped listening to the man who had hired me to sell his deceased parents’ house here in Newfoundland. He was in the process of cleaning out the family home. “I’m sorry,” I said, interrupting him, “but do you hear anything funny over where you are right now?”

  “I do, Patty,” he said. “What is that?”

  I got up from my desk and walked to the window, pulled back the curtain, and found small balls of ice sitting on the outside sill. More plunked against the window as I stood watching. “Weird,” I said. “It’s hail, I think.”

  My client said, “Hail? This time of year?”

  “Like I said, weird.”

  I asked if we could talk a bit later. I wanted to batten down the hatches if we were in for a freak storm. He agreed, and I went to check all the windows, finding on the southwest side of the house a mass of dark, heavy clouds roiling in the distant sky, just past downtown.

  Downtown Newfoundland isn’t much of a downtown. It’s more of a village green, where the town hall, school, and library sit next to faded family-owned stores, which have tried to hang on over the years. These days, most Newfoundlanders don’t mind driving thirty minutes away to buy everything they need from one of the superstores that bookend a dreary shopping mall that seems to have more vacancies in it with each passing year. The clouds rolled like boiling water above those low-slung rooftops. Lightning began to streak through the sky, which seemed to turn darker with each passing second, and my phone squelched with a weather alert in the seconds before a boom made me lift my head again. It was just in time to watch what looked like dark threads unspooling from the heavy, layered clouds: thick at the top, narrowing toward the bottom as they reached for the horizon. “A tornado,” I whispered, as if I had to say the word to understand what I was watching.

  I should have headed straight for the basement, but it was as if I still needed convincing that what I’d seen was real. So I snatched up the remote from the coffee table and quickly scrolled until I came to a weather channel, hoping what I saw might be something else altogether. I hadn’t seen a tornado in years, maybe not since I was a little girl, and even then it never came close enough to where I lived to do much damage. The station was broadcasting an emergency warning, telling people to seek shelter, that there were violent storms in our region, multiple tornadoes, the radar flashing with garish reds and purples—storm cells, I realized.

  I remember sinking to the couch, suddenly out of breath, and that’s when the lights began to flicker. Then the power snapped off and the TV was black, leaving a lingering image of the anchorman for a few seconds before he was gone, too, and I sat alone in the dimness of my living room.

  My first thought was Ellie. Then Dan. My daughter and my husband. Ellie was at school, and I tried to calm myself, because the high school doubled as a community shelter, where anyone could go if they didn’t have a basement. She’d be safe there, I thought. It was my husband I was most worried about then. He worked for the power company. He could have been out on a call, sitting in a bucket at the top of a power line, vulnerable to the storms that were raging toward Newfoundland.

  Violent, I kept thinking. The word the anchorman had used for the storms. Hail still beat against the house. But tornadoes are made of wind, I tried to tell myself. They’re not alive. They can’t think. They can’t be violent, for God’s sake.

  A piece of hail hit a window to my right just then, and a crack streaked through the glass to match the lightning outside.

  I took out my phone and texted Dan.

  Are you okay? I asked.

  Then to Ellie:

  Are you safe, honey?

  I then watched as both of the texts failed to send, trailing red dots next to the messages, asking if I’d like to try again. A second later, the hail suddenly stopped, and I could hear the wail of Newfoundland’s tornado sirens in the distance.

  I finally ran down into the basement. It’s cold, unfinished, housing only a washer and dryer, some clotheslines I’d strung across the ceiling, and a Ping-Pong table that hardly got used after Ellie started joining her high school clubs and activities. There was an old couch down there, too, which I sat on for a few seconds, throwing the beam of my flashlight around in the dark and at the narrow basement windows that occasionally lit up from the lightning.

  I couldn’t sit for long, though. Helpless is the feeling I hate most in life. So I ran back upstairs and pulled out an old emergency scanner my husband and I kept in the kitchen. We hadn’t used it for years, not since we’d bought our first smartphones. But my phone wasn’t working, so the scanner seemed like the thing to try.

  I took it, a box of crackers, and a pack of water bottles, and hustled back down to the basement. I turned the scanner on, hoping it was still charged enough to work. It crackled and fizzed, and I started to spin through its channels until I found one that worked.

  News came to me in broken patches, mostly from the frantic voices of emergency service workers about downed lines and trees, a house fire, cars piled up in an intersection. I could hear fear in their voices, and with each squelch from the scanner, with each boom from outside that set the house rattling around me, my own fear grew, filling the basement like a fog.

  More reports of funnels and wind speeds came a little later, while the wind still shook the house foundations. I sat curled up under the dusty Ping-Pong table, wrapped in an afghan my mother had made for Ellie when she was a newborn. Eventually the reports on the storm, and the tornadoes it continued to spawn, trailed off, and I felt tears prick my eyes as the forecasters began to sum up what they knew so far: three, maybe four tornadoes had touched down in Newfoundland itself, more in the region around us, and reports coming in of mass de
struction. Downed power lines, trees falling into houses. But also news of whole neighborhoods being leveled. The roof of the roller rink, where I met my husband when I was sixteen, collapsing.

  And all of that had apparently happened in the space of no more than an hour.

  I grew up knowing we lived on the far edge of that part of the Midwest known as Tornado Alley, but the last time anything like this had happened was in 1985, when I was still small enough to have no real memory of it. When I was little, the name reminded me of a bowling alley. It was only when I grew older that I thought about that name differently, when I understood that the bowling pins were human lives.

  The tornadoes that tore through Newfoundland that day? They were all strikes.

  I raced upstairs. And that’s where I was when the scanner began to say something about an explosion downtown, a fire raging at the high school, emergency responders trying to bring it under control.

  Nothing made any sense right then or for a while after. I wish I could have remained calmer. I wish I could have been more rational. But I felt a scream push its way up through my chest, then my throat, until I opened my mouth and my daughter’s name came rushing out in a wail. And when I flung open the front door, at first all I could see was a bruise-colored sky, and all I could hear was the word violence, swirling and swirling, until what looked like a rift in the sky opened up, and light poured through, shining down on Newfoundland for a moment.

  And I swear that, as I stood there, I could see shadows flitting in the sky. Shadows that looked like people. They flew higher and higher, and as I watched, I imagined they were the spirits of Newfoundland’s dead flying away—so many of them—passing through that brief gateway of light before, once again, it closed and left us in darkness.

  Amid the sirens sounding throughout Newfoundland, I drove slowly, stopping every so often when I came to trees that had fallen across roads during the storm. In those places, I’d go around if I could or head back in the direction I’d come from if the tree was impassable, hoping to find another way home, hoping I wouldn’t come across something even more dangerous, like the downed power lines I found on Elswick Road, jumping and snapping across the pavement, throwing sparks. And when I finally did pull into our driveway, which was all littered with the torn leaves and bark and white flesh of broken branches, my mom flung the front door open and came running down the porch steps, her face red from crying. She was still crying even as she yanked open my door and leaned in to hug me so hard I thought I’d stop breathing.