by Richard Cox
“Alicia!” her mother screamed. Her voice was desperate, ragged, as if she were dying. But they weren’t going to die. It was obvious from watching the tornado that it was now moving away from them.
“Alicia! Where are you?”
“In my room, mom.”
Her mother appeared and tore her away from the window.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
“We have to get into the bathtub!”
“But the tornado passed us already. They don’t go backward.”
Her mother wasn’t listening. She pushed Alicia toward the bathroom and into the tub.
“Mom, this is stupid! The tornado isn’t coming this way!”
Her mother climbed into the tub with her and pulled Alicia into a sitting position. Threw her arms around her. She was crying.
“Mom, it’s okay. Dad always says—”
“Your dad’s not here! He left us alone!”
“But—”
“You hush, Alicia. Your dad may think he knows everything about the weather, but I know you don’t. This time we’re going to do what I want. No one ever asks me what I want!”
Later they would learn her father had been stranded in the countryside near Seymour when a different tornado he was chasing damaged the car so badly it couldn’t be driven. In the madness that followed the day’s outbreak of tornadoes—twenty-four of them, in fact—it would be hours before he was picked up by a highway patrolman, and days before he could retrieve the car. By then the city of Wichita Falls was beginning to comprehend the effort that would be required to recover from such a catastrophe, and Alicia had understood for the first time that adult relationships—like her parents’ marriage, for instance—weren’t themselves impervious to collapse.
5
Adam Altman couldn’t understand why his mother hadn’t returned from the store. She’d left maybe thirty minutes before to buy medicine, and since no one in the family was ill, the kind of medicine she probably meant was the liquid his parents liked to pour into their sodas or into glasses so tiny they held only one swallow. And anyway it seemed like an odd name, calling this stuff “medicine,” since typically when his parents drank it they felt sick the next day.
His mother had left in a rush, not bothering to turn off the TV, so Adam and his sister, Christi, passed time watching the weatherman talk about how tornadoes were threatening the entire city.
Which was pretty confusing when you considered how close his parents were to God, and how they had explained—many times—that no tornado would ever strike down a family who honored the Lord and His only son, Jesus Christ. Every spring, in fact, Adam’s mom and dad gathered the four of them in the front yard to glorify God and ask for protection against the stormy Texas weather. For years this appeared to work because the only tornadoes Adam had ever seen were in books. Now the guy on TV was advising everyone in town to take cover immediately.
“Climb into your bathtub and cover yourself with a mattress,” said the weatherman. “Or go into a closet and close the door. Whatever you do, do it now. This is a large tornado coming straight into Wichita Falls.”
Adam hadn’t planned to do anything of the sort since he believed, truly, that God was watching over their house. But then the power went out and the two of them were left staring at the dark television set, and their mother still had not returned.
“I’m scared,” said Christi. She was five years old, frightened of everything, and Adam typically felt obligated to poke fun at her every weakness.
But in this case he said, “Remember what Mom and Dad taught us. We pray to Jesus so this sort of thing won’t happen to our family.”
“But the guy on TV said—”
“Mom will be home any minute and she’ll tell us what to do.”
“But what if she doesn’t come home?”
This was an outcome Adam refused to consider. What kind of mother would leave two children home to face a terrible storm alone? And why would God send a tornado toward a family that glorified him?
Adam walked to the front door, the clear storm door, and looked out. The sky was black. The wind was howling and screaming. The trees in their front yard thrashed like they were in agony.
“Let’s get in the coat closet,” he said to Christi. “I’m sure nothing will happen, but it can’t hurt to be careful.”
Soon the two of them were standing between jackets and coats in the claustrophobic darkness. His sister was clutching the pockets of his jeans, shaking, almost crying. She tried to put her arms around him, but he pushed her away. He didn’t enjoy being this close to her or anyone.
“Adam, please hold me!”
But he couldn’t. He wasn’t like other kids. Everything had changed one evening, long ago, when a girl named Evelyn had tricked him into doing something awful. His parents didn’t love him anymore. They loved Christi, who was their favorite, who remained pure because she had not committed the unforgivable sin.
The storm was growing louder. It growled like a giant and angry monster. Beneath the growl it sounded like the world was ending, like cars were crashing and walls were collapsing and the monster’s great feet were scraping across the ground as it approached.
In New Orleans, the night Evelyn betrayed him, Adam had never felt so abandoned, so alone. It was a terrible feeling he would never wish on anyone. But now, when his own sister required his support, Adam resisted. He couldn’t understand why she would want to be held, or why he should be the one to hold her.
“Adam!” Christi screamed. She grabbed his arms, his legs, she choked his stomach. He did not hold her back.
And now the growl was deafening, all around him, everywhere. The house creaked. It made a sound like splitting pants, like nails being hammered, like nails being pried free. Glass shattering, wood tearing. Loose earth. Suffocation.
Inexplicably, beneath all the noise, Adam imagined he could hear music. He imagined a boy was playing this music for him, for all of them. It was hot outside. It was summer.
“Adam!” his sister screamed. “Make it stop! Please!”
They were his friends, these four boys. It was summertime. The sound of the storm was deafening. Adam couldn’t understand where God was. Why had the two children been left all alone?
Then the closet disappeared, or half of it did, and suddenly he was outdoors. The rest of the house, everything but two walls of the closet, was gone. The wind whipped and whistled around them. He could feel the sting of shrapnel on his face and arms, like leaves and twigs and pieces of wood, and his sister was screaming in his ear, and he couldn’t stand it anymore, the guilt. Here was the bare concrete slab of their house, which seemed wrong, wrong and somehow familiar, and he wouldn’t understand for a long time how these flat rectangles would come to define his life.
The tornado plowed onward. Adam could see its backside, swirling and fat from the houses it had devoured. Somehow it had left them behind, had left them alive. God was glorious! God was good!
“Christi?” he said. “Are you okay?”
Even before Adam looked he could tell something was wrong. At some point Christi’s grip had weakened, and she was no longer clutching him the way she had before. In fact he could barely feel her weight at all.
When he looked down at his sister, the world seemed to change somehow. Adam’s head swelled, inflating like a balloon, so expansively he was sure it would burst. His body suddenly weighed less than it ever had and seemed to float into a space where up and down were arbitrary, where all directions were arbitrary, and for a while all he saw was a plane of pure, formless white. In this space he floated for a while, it was impossible to say how long. He may or may not have heard people talking. Or screaming. He couldn’t be sure because everything was obscured by the veil of flat white nothingness.
Eventually Adam returned to find people all around. His next door neighbor, Mrs. Merrill, was kneeling in front of him. She appeared to be speaking, but Adam couldn’t hear what she was saying. Maybe he didn’t want to he
ar.
Because Christi was gone. She was never coming back. Adam had refused to hold her, had chosen not to cover her body with his own, and in this way he had failed her as a big brother. He couldn’t imagine how his mom and dad would react when they learned their favorite child was gone forever.
Later he would pray to God and offer himself in place of Christi. Not only because he was sorry, but because he didn’t really want this life. Nine years was enough time for him to understand that things weren’t someday going to improve. They were just going to keep on getting worse. Eventually the world would go up in flames, and since Adam didn’t want to be around when it happened, he prayed and prayed for God to spare him, to extend this tiny bit of mercy.
But all he received in return was silence.
6
To Todd Willis, the white void wasn’t frightening. It didn’t generate any emotional response at all. It simply existed, and he now he existed within it.
Just before he arrived here, Todd had been trying to forge his mother’s signature on a school progress report while she was on the phone with his dad, who was still at work. Apparently the two of them had discussed something about windows, because after she hung up his mom jogged frantically from room to room opening every window in the house. This behavior of his mother alarmed him more than the approaching tornado, because he’d never seen her run anywhere for any reason.
On the television, the weatherman made loud noises and had himself seemed frightened, which in Todd’s estimation was also a first. Once the windows were opened, his mom grabbed some blankets from the linen closet and took him into the bathroom. They lay down in the tub and she shivered, telling him not to worry. She told him everything would be okay.
But then the winds came, and the roar, and when his mom began to cry Todd knew she was as frightened as he was. He reached for her hand just as everything began to shudder violently.
Then all the sounds and noise disappeared so suddenly it was like they had been playing on a giant tape player that someone had turned off. Like someone with a giant finger had pushed a giant STOP button, ending the sound of the world.
Now there was just this white void. He couldn’t see anything or hear anything and he wondered if he were dead.
After some time passed, he couldn’t say how long, Todd imagined he could hear something after all. Like someone tapping their fingers on a desk, or maybe striking the ground with a stick. At first he thought he’d imagined the sound, but later he heard it again, a little louder, and finally he realized what he was hearing was music.
Somewhere, someone was listening to this music. A rock song, something he’d never heard before. When he looked around at the white void, still seeing no shapes and no colors and no shadows of any kind, Todd couldn’t imagine where the song might be coming from, or how he might find the source of it. If someone was listening to this song, then it followed that someone else must be here with him, someone he could conceivably talk to . . . if he could only figure out how to find them.
The haunting lyrics, however, seemed to dispel any hope of company:
Nobody on the road
Nobody on the beach
I feel it in the air
The summer’s out of reach
Empty lake, empty streets
The sun goes down alone
I’m driving by your house
Though I know you’re not home
At nine years old, Todd had spent little time thinking about his own mortality. Death was something that happened in the movies, and even then it wasn’t well understood. Darth Vader had swiped Obi-Wan Kenobi with his red light saber, something that should have cut the old man in half, but there had been no blood and no body or anything you would normally associate with death. Where had Obi-Wan gone? To a place like this? Was Todd himself dead?
And still he kept hearing that song.
A little voice inside my head said
“Don’t look back. You can never look back.”
I thought I knew what love was
What did I know?
Those days are gone forever
I should just let them go, but—
Maybe he was a ghost, trapped between the living world and the dead. Maybe, if he waited long enough, the white void would disappear and reveal something wonderful. Maybe his arrival here was a test of will, a way to determine if he was worthy of eternal life. He wondered if the song in the background was a clue of some kind.
I can see you
Your brown skin shining in the sun
You got that top pulled down and that radio on, baby
And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone
If this place was a test of will, Todd was up to the task. As nine-year-old kids went, he was one of the stronger ones. He was a patient boy and could wait a long time if he had to.
But in the end the wait was much longer than he or anyone could have imagined.
PART TWO
May 26–29, 2008
ZONE FORECAST PRODUCT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NORMAN OK
TXZ086-271000-
WICHITA-
INCLUDING THE CITIES OF ... WICHITA FALLS
355 PM CST MON MAY 26 2008
.REST OF TODAY ... MOSTLY SUNNY. AFTERNOON HIGH NEAR 95. WINDS SW 15-25 MPH AND GUSTY.
.TONIGHT ... MOSTLY CLEAR. LOW NEAR 66. SOUTH WIND 10-15 MPH.
.TUESDAY ... SUNNY. HIGH IN THE MID 90S. SOUTH WINDS AROUND 20 MPH.
.TUESDAY NIGHT ... CLEAR. LOW IN THE MID 60S. SOUTH WINDS AROUND 15 MPH.
.WEDNESDAY ... SUNNY. HIGH IN THE UPPER 90S.
.THURSDAY ... SUNNY. HIGH NEAR 100.
7
Had Alicia Ulbrecht realized how fundamentally her life would change in the span of seven days, she would have skipped her date with Stuart Pride. Even now, before the fires and the inexplicable music and the storm, Alicia realized it had been a mistake to have dinner with him. Stuart was short, somewhere between muscular and plump, but she could have looked past his appearance if he were friendly or witty (or both). He spent a lot of time talking about himself, but that was true of many successful people, as well as nervous men on first dates. What Alicia could not tolerate from Stuart or any man was blind persistence. He was the kind of guy who invented arbitrary goals for himself and then relentlessly pursued them no matter how unreasonable the goals or what it might take to achieve them. This quality was so fundamental to his character that he might as well have been wearing it on a T-shirt. Four words inscribed in an anxious font: I AM A STRIVER.
Stuart was in charge of what he called Strategic Recruiting at Feldman Golf, a manufacturing plant halfway between Wichita Falls and Burkburnett on I-44. Alicia was curious about his work, because she hoped to move to a bigger and better city and start a real career sometime before she turned fifty. But when she inquired about what sort of training he called upon to select talent, Stuart’s answer revealed a predictably narrow world view.
“Why would I need training?”
“You know,” she said, smiling. “To be able to recognize the ‘best and brightest.’”
“I think I know who is promotable and who isn’t. I was a salesman in the field before this job at headquarters. That’s all the training I need.”
Alicia smiled and laughed and handed control of the conversation to him again. Somehow it seemed like she was always doing this on dates, smiling at men, laughing at their lame jokes, agreeing with their baseless opinions, and she knew she would never meet someone in Wichita Falls. The few intelligent fellows she had encountered over the years, Brandon aside, were boring or religious or both. And even when she made it to a second or third date, when she invariably stopped smiling and agreeing, her first instinct was to challenge, to understand how curious the guy was. Maybe the reason she’d been so attracted to Brandon was that he had been raised in Pennsylvania, that even though his field of study was physics, he still knew more about history than a
nyone she’d ever met. And it didn’t hurt that he’d been nowhere near Wichita Falls when the tornado had ruined the town and everyone who lived here.
Stuart droned on. She tried hard to focus on what he was saying, but since he rarely paused to ask her a question, her attention waned again. She lost interest even in her chicken fajita salad, and for some reason the smell of fried food was making her queasy.
“I’m having a great time this evening,” Stuart barked. “How about you?”
“Sure,” Alicia said. “Chili’s is a great restaurant.”
Her date seemed to accept this and went on to complain how network television could use more programs that appealed to real Americans, like “Home Improvement” and “The Dukes of Hazzard.” He also believed the liberal media was tearing the country apart, except for the local news, which he enjoyed. Alicia smiled at his pauses and began to imagine a studio apartment in Manhattan. It would be microscopic, barely long enough on one side for her to lie down at night, but that wouldn’t matter because she really wouldn’t be there that much. She’d be at corner bookstores and in Central Park and in little cafés where she could read real literature without people shaking their heads, where someone might actually want to have a conversation about books that didn’t begin with a plane crash or a tornado on page two.
As if on cue, Stuart said, “So next year is the thirtieth anniversary of Terrible Tuesday. I can’t believe it’s been that long.”
Terrible Tuesday was the name given to the massive tornado that in 1979 had left 20,000 people in Wichita Falls homeless. It was one of Alicia’s earliest and most visceral memories.