* * *
At home, I found Mom and Dad curled up together on the couch. Mom was asleep against Dad’s side, and he lifted a finger to his lips, grinning. I smiled back and nodded, then slipped upstairs to my room, not wanting to wake Mom, not wanting to have to talk to her about my made-up meeting with Couri. There would be time enough for that in the morning over breakfast, when I knew she’d have at least ten questions about it.
I spent the next hour or so in bed, staring up at my ceiling, which didn’t have any decorative plaster whirls or sparkles the way the ceilings in Noah’s house did. It was plain and flat and white, and when I looked at it, I wished there was something more to it that could distract me. To distract me from the sounds of my own existence. My breath as I sighed, suddenly there for a moment, audible. The hard beats of my heart as they pressed against my chest.
But in the end, maybe not having anything to distract me made me notice something else. Something that I was immediately grateful for. That hole at the center of my body, where for weeks on end I’d only heard the sound of emptiness—that gone away place—didn’t feel so big, so deep or wide, as it once did. It had closed up a little. And for the first time in a long time, I fell asleep without crying into my pillow. I was able to sleep through the night, too, until the next morning, when I woke and began to make good on my promise to Noah.
* * *
The first thing I did was to tell my parents something they’d been hoping to hear from me for a while now. They’d been skirting the issue, not wanting to push me, just wanting me to want things for myself again. So they were happy and relieved when I told them that I needed to start getting things together if I was going to move into a dorm room in Pittsburgh in just a few weeks. It was probably the only way to get Mom to cut down on her volunteer hours, which is what she said she’d do immediately, so she could divert the time to help me get ready.
In the later weeks, I wrote to Margery Addison in Salamanca, New York, to tell her that I was in fact the Ellie Frame she’d been looking for, and to thank her for going so far out of her way to return the photos I’d taken of my friends. I told her their names, and I told her something I treasured about each one of them, and I told her that they were all gone now. I told her having their photos back, particularly this set, where I’d tried to capture each of them in a moment of happiness without their realizing I was taking their picture, meant more to me now because I’d never see them again, except in my memory. I told her she’d given me something beyond value in her act of kindness.
Then I printed that letter out and took it to the post office in Cortland, since the one in Newfoundland was still being rebuilt, and sent it out before driving back to Newfoundland to pay a visit to the Sano farm.
I found Mr. and Mrs. Sano drinking glasses of iced tea on their front porch when I pulled into their drive. Mrs. Sano gave me a wave as I got out of my car, and as I came up the steps to join them on the porch, Mr. Sano said, “We’ve been wondering if we might see you sometime soon, Ellie.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
And Mrs. Sano said, “Because Rose is gone now, sweetie. She’s safe now. She was able to leave. And she wanted us to make sure you knew that.”
I sniffed and forced the tears that sprang to my eyes to stay there, put my hands on my cheeks while I looked up at the porch ceiling for a moment, then looked back down and told them, “That’s a relief. Thank you. I didn’t know how I might even begin to ask you about her.”
“We know, Ellie,” Mr. Sano said, smiling sadly. “Rose told us you’d been over to see her.”
They invited me to stay, and gave me tea and told me of how Rose was certain that the gray area all of the dead had spoken of was starting to fade. “Like mist or fog,” Mrs. Sano said, quoting Rose, “burning off the fields in the morning.”
We talked about Rose for a while, remembering her, and as the sun reached its noontime peak above us, I said, “I’ll leave you to your chores now.” Because I knew from all the times I’d stayed overnight at the Sano house for the past ten years that noon was when Mr. Sano would begin to see to the various tasks he had to do each day on their farm.
They kept me from leaving for only a moment, while Mrs. Sano went inside the house and returned with a bottle of the rose-scented perfume Rose’s grandmother would send her each year from Japan for her birthday. “I can’t,” I told them, but they laughed and assured me that there were others. That Rose could never get through one bottle, it seemed, before her grandmother sent another.
Back in my car, I spritzed the perfume and inhaled, and saw Rose so clearly in my mind’s eye that it felt as if she were sitting right there next to me, ready to pick up Becca and Adrienne so we could drive over to Niles to see a movie or go to Cortland to get coffee at the all-night diner.
I didn’t go back to Becca’s house, because I’d had my chance to say goodbye to her. But I did email her mother the video of her last will and testament, which she’d asked me to show her parents. And I did text Couri to tell her that, even though I’d be leaving to start college in a few weeks, she should feel free to call or text me if she ever needed to talk. About Adrienne or about anything at all. She texted back and said she hoped I meant it, because she would, and that hopefully in a few years I’d know Pittsburgh well, because she wanted to go to Carnegie Mellon after she graduated.
I drove out to Noah’s house, too. His parents were still gone, though, still visiting family in Arizona, trying to grieve away from the place that would only remind them of their son on a daily basis. I just sat in their drive for a while, looking up at the front of the house before getting out to walk around to the back, where I stared up at the window that was Noah’s bedroom. I made myself remember the first time he and I went to the lighthouse and the story I’d told him that night about why it had been built in the first place. The story my mom had told me about the way I’d know someone loved me, back when I was a little girl.
And when I got into my car afterward, he was right: I was smiling a little. Just like he said I’d be.
When I backed out to leave, I saw Mrs. Mueller across the road, sitting on her front porch, and I waved to her through my window. I waited for a moment afterward, and eventually her silhouette raised one hand into the air above her.
* * *
This is the hardest story I’ve ever had to tell. Not because I don’t have anything to say, though. And not because I don’t have anything of value to leave behind. It’s the hardest story I’ve ever had to tell because I’m the one who had, at least at first, been left behind, and now I’m the one leaving everything else behind—my town, my family, the past seventeen years of my life—all so that I can move on and into a future where I’ll start making the next part of my life. This is the hardest story I’ve ever had to tell because I’ve never had to do anything like that before, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say that leaving everything I’ve ever known is a little bit scary.
But I can’t stay here, either. I can’t let what’s gone away remain an empty space inside me. I need to fill it with new places, with new people, with new love, if possible, and with new life. And I’ll do that. I’ll do that even as I carry everything I can from my past—all of my lost loved ones—along with me into whatever future it is I’m moving into.
And someday, when my soul drifts up into view, I know they will all be there to greet me, and all of us will be together again.
Until then, I’ll remember.
I’ll remember to remember.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I was ten years old in 1985 when an outbreak of over forty tornadoes swept across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ontario, Canada, over a nine-hour period. Many of the tornadoes produced that day registered as F4, and one in particular registered as F5, on the Fujita scale. An F5 is a rare type of tornadic storm, the damage from which is characterized as “incredible” on the Fujita scale, and aptly
referred to as “the finger of God” in the 1996 film Twister. In all, the May 31, 1985, tornadoes killed ninety people, injured more than a thousand, and resulted in over a billion dollars in damage to the communities they tore through. The outbreak is still considered by the National Weather Service to be one of the most significant tornado events of all time in the United States.
I grew up in Trumbull County, Ohio, where the largest and fiercest of the tornadoes appeared that day in the greater Youngstown area, stretching more than three hundred feet across and moving relentlessly at speeds of fifty miles per hour, staying on the ground for forty-seven miles. The towns within its reach were left looking as if a giant had trampled through, leveling a shopping plaza, collapsing the roof of a roller rink, which, only an hour later, would have been full of kids and teenagers, destroying all of the homes in many neighborhoods, picking up three thirty-foot-tall petroleum storage tanks that weighed 75,000 pounds each, crumpling them like paper cups and hurling them across the street. A steel-framed trucking plant was demolished and partially swept away. Cars were piled up along the roads, and some were left in fields where they’d been dropped. The National Weather Service described the area as looking like a “bombed-out battlefield.”
My father was a supervisor at the Trumbull County engineer’s office at the time, and in the days that followed the storms, my family barely saw him. He and his colleagues, along with the National Guard, were working constantly to clear the streets in the county. Once they were clear, though, he returned and took my mother and brothers and me on a guided tour of the devastation. I had never seen the world I lived in so disordered and ruined. One of my eeriest memories is passing through a town where the tornado had pulled the headstones and statuary right out of the earth in a cemetery and deposited them throughout a nearby neighborhood. I remember seeing the statue of an angel whose wings had been broken off when it landed on the sidewalk.
People in this area still talk about that tornado, about that day and the days that followed. Everyone has a story, either from their own experience or one that they’ve been told by older relatives or friends. It was an event that touched everyone in some way, and it remains a part of our shared history.
Memories of tragedies and disasters on this level can eventually fade, though, especially for those of us who were kids at the time. The outbreak of my childhood was something that I’ve always remembered, but recalled with less frequency over the three decades since it occurred. It wasn’t until 2011, when another natural disaster struck—the tsunami that wiped out a large swath of the Pacific coast of Japan, where I’d once lived for two years teaching English—that I began to dwell again on the tornadoes of 1985.
Though I’d returned home in 2006, I still had people I loved in Japan five years later, including former students and colleagues who continued to live and teach there after I’d left. In the days and weeks after the tsunami hit, I had a difficult time reaching most of them. Frantic for information, I spent a lot of time on the Internet, trying to learn whatever I could, hoping that none of them had been affected, worrying as the death toll rose into the thousands that this might be an outsized hope, and grieving for strangers as images of that ravaged coastline began to appear.
For a long time, I kept track of the aftermath of the tsunami and the efforts taking place to reconstruct the lives of so many people who had lost everything. And over the months and years that followed, some of the most fascinating stories were reports of those ruined communities being haunted by those who died in the tsunami. People claimed to hear their dead loved ones communicating with them as disembodied voices. Others claimed to see their ghosts. Cases of possession by dead family members began to appear. In 2014, the writer Richard Lloyd Parry reported extensively on this phenomenon in the London Review of Books, and has recently published a book about it called Ghosts of the Tsunami.
These stories of the communities that suffered so much and lost so many at the hands of a natural disaster that they began to be haunted would not leave my mind. And the images of the ruined towns stirred my memories of the 1985 tornadoes in my own hometown, bringing similar images to the surface, similar stories of people here who had lost someone in that storm. It was this collision of memories that compelled me to write The Gone Away Place.
In this new world where we’re experiencing more frequent extreme weather events due to a changing climate, and natural disasters continually threaten, it seems we should brace ourselves for more challenging times, not just as individuals but also as communities, both local and global. We will need one another to recover and to grieve all that we have lost and may still lose. It is my hope that this book might serve to make others experiencing tragedies of this kind feel less alone as they find their way forward in their own stories.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my agent, Barry Goldblatt, for all that he does to keep me telling stories, and to my editor, Melanie Nolan, for pushing me to go further and for keeping me honest. Thanks, too, to my mom and dad, for recounting their stories from the May 31, 1985, tornado outbreak and for finding old photos when I asked for them.
is the Stonewall Honor–winning author of Wonders of the Invisible World for teens, as well as the acclaimed adult novel One for Sorrow, which was made into a major motion picture, Jamie Marks Is Dead. He is also the author of the Nebula Award finalist The Love We Share Without Knowing and the short-story collection Before and Afterlives, which won the Shirley Jackson Award. Christopher grew up in rural Ohio, has lived in a Southern California beach town and the capital of Michigan, and has taught English outside Tokyo. Currently he teaches fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University. You can find him on Twitter at @Cbarzak or at christopherbarzak.com.
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The Gone Away Place Page 24