The Stormchasers: A Novel

by Jenna Blum

  But when she faces Charles with a placating smile, he is watching her calmly, arms folded.

  “I’m not crazy, K,” he says.

  Karena stretches her smile. “I wasn’t thinking that, Charles.”

  Charles sighs. “Of course you were,” he says, “but that’s beside the point. The point is, I’m going to do this. I’m going to New Heidelburg maybe next week, as soon as I tie up some loose ends, and I’m going to tell the sheriff what happened.”

  “Okay,” says Karena, scrambling to catch up and pull ahead. Meanwhile she evaluates Charles: his expression peaceful, even sorrowful. His posture relaxed. His speech a normal tempo. No sign of the djinn’s staccato diatribes, the jeering, twitchy energy. At the moment, Charles appears perfectly sane, and that is the scariest thing of all. A cold needle slips into Karena’s stomach.

  “But I don’t understand,” she says. “Why now? Why are you doing this after all this time?”

  “Because I’m tired, K,” says Charles. “Because I’m so freaking tired of seeing the guy. Because I’m tired of waking up and finding him on the foot of my bed. He still comes every night, did I tell you that? Yes, he does. Every night at four thirty, on the dot. He never says anything, never does anything, just sits there and looks at me. Just like before, when we’d just done it, except he doesn’t smell anymore, he’s too desiccated. And his skin’s bleached out—what’s left of it—and the blood on his shirt’s all brown because he’s been dead such a long time—”

  “I get the picture, Charles.”

  “Except you don’t,” says Charles earnestly. “That’s just it, K. I can never say enough to make you understand how bad it is. I killed him, K, and he knows that, and the only way to make him go away is to turn myself in.”

  Karena pulls her hair back.

  “Charles,” she says, “you might not like what I’m about to say, but as your sister who loves you I have to say it. There is another way to make him go away, and you know it. You could take meds.”

  Charles shakes his head.

  “No,” he says. “I’m not going to do that. Don’t ever ask me to do that, K. I mean, you can ask all you want, but I’m not going to. Never again.”

  “Okay, but,” says Karena, “there have been so many advances since the last time you took them, Charles. Even since—when were you in Kansas with that woman? 2000, right? Eight years ago, and do you know how many new drugs they’ve invented since then? They come out with new drugs every day!”

  “So what, you want me to be a guinea pig now?” says Charles. “To keep trying this one and that one like it’s nothing, like they’re vitamins or candy or something? They’re not, K. Don’t you get that? They fuck with my brain chemistry. They change my brain. So in essence, what you’re saying I should do is compromise my very self, my understanding and feeling of who I am, to conform to what you want. Is that it?”

  “No, Charles, not at all. Of course that’s not what I meant. We were talking about Motorcycle Guy and how he terrifies you! Don’t you want to make him go away?”

  Charles scrapes his hands through his hair and looks at the slate floor.

  “Not at that price,” he says. “No. Never. And the thing is, actually, he may never go away, anyway, K. I’ve thought about this a lot. He may still keep coming even after I turn myself in. But at least when I look at him, I won’t have to feel so bad. I can say, Hey, buddy, how you doing, sorry about what happened, but at least you can see I’m making amends here.”

  Amends! Karena pounces on this.

  “Charles,” she says, “I appreciate your trying to do the right thing. I do. But as you said to me once, what’s it going to change if you turn yourself in? He’s not coming back—Motorcycle Guy. You can’t bring him back. Remember when you said that? So why don’t you try to make amends some other way, like—like working in a soup kitchen or something. Or working for FEMA. Sure, that’d be a good fit for you, helping people in communities destroyed by storms, like Oweeo—”

  But Charles is shaking his head again.

  “Stop, K,” he says. “Believe me, I’ve run this all over in my mind at least a million times. As of today, it’s been twenty years, one month, and six days since we killed him. How many days is that? That’s how many times I’ve gone over it. Anyway. It’s a nice idea, but it won’t work. The karma is all out of whack. We took a man’s life, and serving chicken noodle to the homeless isn’t going to fix that. The only way to do it is to step up and admit what we’ve done. Because come on, K. As you said to me that afternoon, we did the very worst thing we could do to another human being. We stole his life away. Are you trying to tell me you don’t ever think about that?”

  Karena sighs and looks down, at her own bare feet with their chipped-polish toenails, then at her brother’s large, square brown ones. Of course she does. Of course she thinks about Motorcycle Guy. Over that twenty years, one month, and six days, she’s had plenty of time to wonder who he was—usually at four thirty in the morning. She’s constructed a whole life for him, as if he’s a Hell’s Angel paper doll. She’s given him a double-wide trailer with a sink full of dirty dishes, a bureau full of flannel shirts with cut-off arms, pot plants in the closet. She’s given him a La-Z-Boy recliner patched with duct tape and a satellite dish so he can watch five hundred channels. She’s given him a drinking habit and mild pot addiction and the occasional sniff of coke, because he had to be on something that day, didn’t he? had to be coming back from the local watering hole where he was getting plastered with his buddies, because why else would he ever have driven into that storm? On a motorcycle? Who would do that? Karena has given Motorcycle Guy a cat, not a dog, because a cat wouldn’t miss him when he didn’t come home, would just eat all the garbage beneath his counter and then jump out the window and go feral. She has given him several angry ex-wives who said good riddance when they heard he was dead because he never paid alimony anyway, and she gave him one daughter who never received child-support checks and was better off without him. In fact, Motorcycle Guy has probably done some time himself, for B&E or assault or dealing, and although Karena knows everything she’s imagined is a terrible cliché, every reporter’s instinct in her screaming in protest, she can’t stand to think otherwise. She can’t stand to think Motorcycle Guy might have had a job, a family, a pet, a way to contribute, people out there who miss him.

  But either way, it doesn’t matter. Charles is right. Whether the guy was Gandhi on a Harley or a complete waste of space, what they have done is still wrong. They took his cat, his bike, his recliner, his breath. They have ended his life.

  Then something occurs to Karena. She looks at her brother, who is watching her with grave compassion, and says, “Why do you keep saying we?”

  “Because we did it,” says Charles. “Or rather I did, but you were there, K. You had agency too. You could have done the right thing.”

  Karena cannot believe how unfair this is.

  “But I didn’t, Charles, because somebody begged me not to,” she says. “Let’s see, who could that somebody be? You, Charles! You!”

  “Well, I know that, K,” says Charles. “But I was wrong. I was scared, and I was just a kid. I didn’t know any better.”

  “Oh, like I did?” says Karena. “In all my infinite eighteen-year-old wisdom? I was scared too! And if you recall, I was trying to protect you!”

  “I know that, K,” says Charles, “and I’ll never forget that. You did protect me—at least, until you called the sheriff on me. But let’s not get into that right now. The point is, this isn’t like some high school prank you do and then forget about, like stealing somebody’s car or whatever. I know it was twenty years ago, but still. We have to balance the scales.”

  “Okay,” says Karena, “you do that, Charles. But leave me out of it.”

  “Oh, K,” says Charles. “Are you sure? I’m giving you the chance to make things right. Are you sure you don’t want to take it? It might do you some good.”

  Karena incline
s her head.

  “And what is that supposed to mean,” she says.

  Charles waves around at her kitchen, toward her living room, the light streaming in through the front windows, serene and sunny on a weekend afternoon.

  “You’ve achieved an awful lot, K,” he says. “I’m proud of you. You’ve got a great career, beautiful home, and you did it all by yourself. But that’s just it—you’re all by yourself. And that’s just wrong. Come on, K. We both know you should have a husband, kids. You’re a giving person. You’re not cut out to spend the rest of your life alone.”

  For a few seconds Karena is so angry she can hardly see. Then she sees two of Charles, which makes it even worse. Is she having a stroke?

  “Okay, Charles,” she says, “thanks so much. You know who you sound like? Your favorite person—Tiff. Or Shamu or Trog Number One or Deep Throat or whatever you want to call her. She says exactly the same thing—that my life’s useless because I don’t have a husband and kids. Well, you know what? I like my useless life! So the two of you can both go fuck your judgmental selves!”

  Charles is nodding sagely.

  “Sure,” he says, “I can see how it’d come off like that. But we’re not trying to judge you. We love you. We’re calling ’em as we see ’em. Shamu may be a raging bitch, but I never said she was stupid.”

  Karena gives a now-I’ve-heard-it-all scoff.

  “Okay, as you wish,” she says. “This conversation has devolved into utter stupidity. I’m leaving. I’m out.”

  “Fine,” says Charles, “do whatever you want. I’m just saying, K, I know you’ve thought about this. I can feel you thinking about it, when you wake up in the night, and it’s really painful. I just think, as long as you have this secret, you won’t be able to get close to anybody. And that’s a real shame.”

  Karena laughs, again.

  “Oh my God, what are you, a talk show host now?” she says. “What is this, the Chuck Hallingdahl Show? Why do I have this secret, Charles? This absurd, hideous, festering secret? Because of you! You’re the one who asked me to carry it in the first place!”

  “And I regret that,” says Charles. “I’m trying to make up for it. I know it sounds ridiculous, K, but just think about it. That’s all I’m asking,” and Karena hears this too, echoing back to her from that day in Decorah: Just give me a little time, K, to figure it out. Tiff and Kevin are right. Her brother will destroy her.

  She goes out into the living room to look for her running shoes. The space is brilliant with light. And it is clean—at least it was before Charles got here—and boasts all the signs of a happy, well-lived life: the fireplace, Karena’s books filling the shelves on either side, the shells she picked up on vacations lining the windowsills. The floorboards she sanded and painted herself. The couch and chairs she picked out, also by herself—and suddenly Karena remembers her former therapist, Dr. B, saying, I just can’t understand it. We’ve made such good progress, but I feel there’s something you’re holding back from me, that you hold back from everybody, that prevents you from getting close to people. Do you have any idea what it is? and Karena had shrugged and held out her palms with a face that said search me. Then she had missed the next session, and the next, and after that, really, what was the point of going back?

  Charles is watching her from the kitchen doorway.

  “Plus, what about the Loaf?” he asks. “I won’t tell, K. I swear. As far as the investigation goes, I was the only one in the Jeep that day, if that’s the way you want it. But are you seriously going to try and keep this from him? As much crap as I give you about the guy, he’s very smart and intuitive. The longer you wait to tell him, the harder it’s going to be on both of you.”

  Karena straightens up and glares at Charles.

  “Don’t you dare,” she says. “Don’t you even talk about my relationship with Kevin. That’s mine, that’s my business. You leave it alone.”

  Charles retreats a few steps. “Okay, okay. All I’m saying is, I can see you’re hopeful for a chance at something with him, and I wish you all the best. But how are you going to sustain the relationship if you don’t have trust?”

  “You know,” says Karena, “I don’t know, Charles. Maybe you can figure that out for me, since you’re so wise now. And when you do, you let me know—when I come back. Because I’m going out now, and I’ll be out for a while, and as far as I’m concerned, this insane conversation is over. As in o-ver. Okay, Charles?”

  Charles shrugs.

  “If you say so, sistah,” he says, and although Karena knows this is not a real answer, that at any minute he could take off the apron and get in his car and drive to New Heidelburg and blow the whole stinking thing out of the water, she just can’t stand to fight with him anymore. She pushes open the front door and goes out.

  46

  She spends that night at Kevin’s, and with every passing hour the argument, which initially balloons in Karena’s head to terrifying proportions, starts to lose power. In an odd way it helps that Karena can’t tell Kevin about it, forces her not to think about it, her time with him a reassuring baseline normality. They see a movie, walk hand in hand along Grand Avenue and stop at a beer garden and sit outside, then return to Kevin’s man cave. By the following afternoon, when Karena returns home, Charles’s ridiculous plan seems like something she has dreamed, a nightmare that fades by midmorning. She decides to not even mention it to him. Least said, soonest mended, as Grandmother Hallingdahl would say.

  But when Karena gets home, Charles’s yellow Volvo is gone. And she knows the second she steps inside he’s not in the house. It is muggy and close—Charles disdains the AC, says it contributes to global warming, so he shuts it off whenever he leaves. In his absence the rooms are so quiet Karena can hear the grind of the old clock over her stove, and the thunk of ice cascading into the ice maker makes her jump. She has to set the damned thing to Off. Ever since she got back from chasing it reminds her of hail.

  She stands still, tapping her lips and thinking. It isn’t unusual for Charles to be out. He has his errands during the day: food shopping, meditating by the lake—and sometimes, Karena suspects, seeing the au pair he met there. Karena hasn’t asked, and Charles hasn’t told. That’s the way they’ve tacitly agreed to set it up. Charles has even been away overnight, when the forecast indicates the chance of a local chase. Karena has never worried that he’s left again for good. Not without telling her. But that was before he threatened to turn himself in.

  She goes to the foot of the master suite steps and hesitates. This is a total invasion of privacy. Ever since Karena has conceded her bedroom to Charles, she hasn’t been up there. But there are certain things Charles would take with him if he’d gone to New Heidelburg. Not clothes, probably not even toiletries, but his herbal supplements and laptop, Karena guesses, although they would be confiscated, and definitely his ledger, which might not. Charles would never go anywhere without his ledger, the one item he asked for in Black Wing. Karena knocks, twice to be safe, then shakes her head at herself and goes up.

  The carpeted stairwell smells a little scorched, like burnt sage. Karena will have to open a window in here, she is thinking. As long as she remembers to close it before Charles gets home so he won’t know she’s been up here—

  Then she rounds the corner and comes up into the long open room beneath the eaves, and she stops. Stares. Her leg muscles tense for flight. She might as well have walked in to find a snake on the carpet.

  Charles has turned the space into his new lair.

  It is not an exact replica. There are no lightning lamps this time nor shelves of mysterious electronic equipment. And of course the bones of the room are still Karena’s, the vaulted architecture, the airy space and sun filtering through the skylights. But the walls flutter with paper—if Charles dislikes the AC, he has no such objection to the old-fashioned oscillating fan he’s dragged home from some curb or back alley. It sweeps right to left, left to right, ticking at the end of each journey and
stirring the pages and pages and pages Charles has taped up. Lined notebook paper covered with his tiny handwriting, column upon column of numbers. What are these, map coordinates, barometric pressure readings, equations? There are photos tacked here and there, the ubiquitous tornadoes, lightning, the anvil-shaped supercells Karena now sometimes sees in her sleep. Drawings too of spirals, Sioux medicine wheels, cloud structures. Over the bed, next to a head-size dream catcher, is a list—

  Kava Kava

  Valerian

  A, B, B6, B12, C, D, E, zinc

  California poppy

  St. John’s wort

  Green tea

  Algae

  Eddie’s brew

  Tiny checkmarks straggle to the margin of the paper. There is also a note scribbled in Bic pen—big writing, not Charles’s—on a Casey’s place mat:

  The Legend Goes There Is A Brave With A Very Bad Temper. The Elders Of His Tribe Do Everything They Can To Cure Him With Medicines, But They Cant So They Lock Him In A Cell. The Brave Is Very Angry And Yells To Be Let Out. When Nobody Comes, He Paces. Round And Round For Many Nights, Faster And Faster, Until Finally He Explodes The Cell And Whirls Up Into The Sky. First He Destroys The Elders, Then The Village, Then The Tribe. Then He Whirls Away To Cause Destruction Elsewhere. The Great Spirit Catches Him And Holds Him Until Spring, But Every Year At That Time The Brave Returns To The Plains To Cause Destruction. It Is Part Of The Cycle Of Death And Prosperity. ~ Eddie Black Cloud.

  “Whoa,” Karena says.

  She sits heavily on the bed. How could she have overlooked what’s been percolating under her own roof? How can she have been so stupid? Or has she? That’s the tricky thing about Charles’s disorder—Karena just never knows. Certain behaviors might mean something, or they could just be Charles being Charles. Karena begins toting up signs, starting with the basics—like any sick animal, when Charles is hypomanic, the disruptions begin in his sleeping, eating, and hygiene patterns. The music on all night up here—Charles may or may not be falling asleep listening to it. He might have been pacing, but because it’s carpeted, Karena hasn’t heard him. There’s the accumulation of green tea bottles in the recycling bin—when Charles is winding up into mania he drinks and drinks and drinks. Then again it’s August, everyone’s thirsty. Hygiene: the madras shirt Charles was wearing yesterday, was he not wearing it the day before? Possibly the day before that? But he’s a guy, and all his shirts look the same . . .