by Joni Rodgers
She pulled the phone book across the counter, tore a page out, fed it down. It frenzied for a second, then disappeared. She reached for a slender, long-stemmed glass from the cupboard and dropped it in. It danced, whistling and shringing, spitting shards of crystal, but in a few moments, the rim was gone from sight. The grinding sounded angrier then, less accepting, but still efficient, familiar, relentless.
Kiki made a closed fist and pushed it past the triangular rubber safety flaps. She felt the vibration in her whole arm, and dancing bits of crystal tingled between her hand and the metal chamber, but at the moment the rotating blades began to graze her knuckles, there was a deafening rock of thunder. Lightning cast a brief, piercing glare across the countertops and stove, and then everything fell to darkness.
The disposal ground to a halt.
The refrigerator wheezed once and stopped running.
Kiki stood in the brittle shell of the kitchen, waiting for her home to explode, acutely aware of the glassy feeling of her face, a veneer of numbness over deep blue pockets of pain.
“Mommeee!” came Chloe’s voice, thinned by terror and made smaller by the storming.
Kiki followed the plaintive strand and found Oscar and Chloe both crying in their bedroom.
“The light went off,” Chloe whispered when Kiki took her up in her arms. “Oscar is scared.”
“Oh, don’t be scared, my sweeties. Shhh. Don’t be scared. It can’t last much longer.” Kiki sat on the beanbag chair between their beds, and they huddled close on either side of her. “Shhhh. That’s just a lot of angels singin’ the blues. That’s what my mama used to tell me.” She settled her bruised cheek into the cool sateen of Chloe’s pink ruffled bedspread. “Something made ‘em sad, and that’s the crying in the wind. Something made ‘em mad, and that’s the thunder booming. Shhh. Listen.”
Through the fusion of wind and rain, a low, collective thrumming could be felt. Chloe strained forward, tearstained and intense.
“They’re coming,” she whispered.
“Yes, baby. Just close your eyes.”
“Is it a tornado, Mama?” Oscar asked.
“Maybe,” Kiki said vacantly. “Maybe it’ll pick us up and take us to the land of Oz. And we’ll go spinning... far away to the Emerald City.”
“But what about the witch?” Chloe cried.
“Oh, yeah,” Kiki lifted her head. “I forgot about the witch.”
Climbing up onto the bed, she pushed aside the Pooh curtains and looked out. At first, she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. It seemed like a tear in the tenuous fabric of her own vision, a stain dribbling down the far-off clouds onto the distant horizon. But then it retracted. And then it extended downward again, an angled finger poking through the turbulent sky, pointing at Adam and his kind, threatening them to live or else.
“Oh, Jesus,” Kiki whimpered. “Jesus, please help me.”
“Mama,” Oscar peeked over her shoulder, his big-boy voice pockmarked with tears and panic, “we should open the windows. And we should get in the tub. In the middle-est part of the house.”
“What?”
“They said,” he nodded emphatically. “On Discovery Channel.”
Kiki gritted her teeth to keep from telling him that this thing would either kill you or not, as it wanted to, but when she turned on him, he put his hand out of his pajama sleeve and stroked her cheek.
“They said, Mama. On TV, they said.”
“All right. Okay.” She nodded and swallowed. “Okay, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll open the windows, and we’ll get in the tub, and we’ll be safe.”
She made the bathtub soft with towels on the bottom before they stepped in and let her legs dangle over the side, so they could hide their faces in her lap as she stroked their heads and sang softly to them.
“I see the moon and the moon sees me under the shade of the old oak tree...”
But the lullaby was taken by the storm on the roof of the carport, lacerated with sheets of rain, strangled with the sound of leaves and pine needles choking at the gutters. Kiki’s ears popped, and the sudden, unpleasant overclarity made her realize how the pressure inside her head had been building without her even noticing. The walls thrummed with the same painful hollow as her skull.
“Stay right here.”
“No, Mama, don’t go!” Chloe squealed and tried to hold her there, but she dragged herself forward onto the edge of the tub.
“You stay here, Chloe! You stay! Oscar, you make her sit there. I’m gonna go wake up Daddy.”
But Oscar caught her hand as she stood.
He didn’t speak it out loud. Didn’t want the angels to get any angrier. He just looked up at Kiki with his wide, wise eyes, and shook his head.
Kiki felt like she was going to throw up again.
“Stay,” she said, and drew the shower curtain across their small, frightened faces.
In the bedroom, Wayne lay asleep, his arm across his chest. Blood was seeping through the white shirt on his elbow, and he breathed with a congested rattle.
Kiki lightly pressed his shoulder with the heel of her hand.
When he made no sound or movement, she bent down and picked up the poker from the floor where he’d dropped it. She balanced it in her hands for a moment, then laid it carefully beside his head.
She picked up two pillows and propped them, one on either side of his face, tucked snugly over his ears, then located his jeans in the rumpled bedding and rifled the pockets for the car keys, shaking them, straining to hear the blessed tinny sound of metal on pocket chain. She skimmed her hand over the bedclothes to see if they’d fallen by his side, whispering “Dang! Dang it!” when she couldn’t find them.
The wind was shrieking now, the trees in the yard bowing and cracking like an old woman’s hips. She ran back to the living room, where the curtains flapped furiously at the open windows, lace sheers knotting and unknotting, drapery legs flailing against the wall. Yanking the cushions off the couch and easy chair, groping beneath and between every section, Kiki prayed for the solid keys to come into contact with her trembling fingers.
Brother go find your brother. God please please please Jesus help me.
“Dang!”
She squeezed her forehead between her hands and realized he must have left them in the truck.
“Oscar! Chloe!” She dragged them out of the tub and threw their blankets across her back. “Let’s go. C’mon!”
“I need my glasses,” Oscar protested.
“No! We’ll get another pair, sweetie, just the same, I promise. Now c’mon!”
When Kiki opened the front door, it tore away from her hand, snapped the stop-chain, and flattened itself against the wall of the house. The little redwood deck was gone—potted geraniums, garden angel, and front steps with it.
The tornado stood before them, curving down like a spine to the northwest of the highway, half a mile away. Dust and debris swirled up in a Dorcas dance around the base—twirling, worshipping, orgiastic. Cars, trees, and tar paper roofs forgot what they were and flew into the air, intoxicated by the dizzying current, sucked into the whirling center of the funnel. They rose, ecstatic, not knowing as Kiki did the price that must be paid for any such moment of weightlessness. They soared, cast outward by centrifugal force, then landed—splintering, bellowing, indignant.
The noise was enormous, celestial, so far beyond thunder, it surpassed sound and bordered on the west side of silence.
“Jump!” Kiki seized Oscar and Chloe by their wrists, not trusting the grasp of their small, frantic hands. “One! Two! Three!”
They leaped into the wind, hit the mud, and fell to their hands and knees. Straining into the suffocating gale, she dragged them to their feet and headed toward the drainage ditch thirty feet away. The children hung from her hands, barely touching the ground. They screamed, and Kiki screamed with them, voices unraveling like threads, stinging in their throats when they could no longer hear themselves.
There was water in the bot
tom of the culvert. Kiki couldn’t see it, but razor-bright droplets scoured her face. She pulled Oscar and Chloe to the ground, her body covering theirs. The blankets caped and soared, as she spanned her wings out over her young.
Kiki felt herself at the center of all things: the lashing weeds, the ragged cobweb of voices, the tangle of wind-flown hair, the thundering, the silence, the twisted powers of anger and chaos and love. She raised her face to the heaving green sky, wailing in convective harmony with the violent troposphere. The psalm keened out of her, gloria matri, exalting every moment of her survival within the house of Wayne Liam Daubert, Jr., rejoicing in the life she’d brought to its hollow core, celebrating her exodus and its destruction, rising higher, higher, until the howling army of angels encompassed her, and every temporal thing in their path was taken up toward heaven.
The spinning world became surreal. There was a feeling of being lifted, dissipated, taken away. Looking up brought a torrent of rushing images and colors, focusing downward brought a scalp-raising pressure, and all the while, there was the endless screaming of the children.
Kit felt nauseous.
Clinging to the sides of the pink teacup as it hurtled round and round, she silently cursed Walt Disney, a man whom, until this day, she’d loved as dearly as she loved her own father.
“Crank, Mommy! Crank! I wanna spin!” Mitzi shouted, heaving with all her might on the wheel between their laps, but her small hands and slender back were not enough to affect the forces of physics.
“No, sweetie, that’s enough spinning,” Kit murmured, doubtful that her diluted voice would be heard through the joyful music from above and the mechanical whirring from below.
How much longer can this go on? she wondered, and in answer, the ride ground down to a circling stop, and a wholesome young man in leiderhosen stepped over to help them out. Mel and Cooper climbed out of their yellow teacup, and Mitzi danced over to them.
“Again, Daddy! Again!” she squealed, but Kit held up her hand.
“You okay?” Mel asked. “You look a little green around the gills.”
“To tell you the truth, I feel a little queasy. Could we just—”
“Off to Mr. Toad, then!” he declared, consulting The Complete Guide To Disney World, his Bible, as he planned every joyful step of one perfect day on the immaculate streets of The Happiest Place on Earth. “Says here that’s a pretty tame one, honey. Maybe you can sit a little while we wait in line.”
“Oh... well... okay.”
She took his elbow, and they headed in that direction, Mitzi and Coo chanting, “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride! Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride!” over and over again. She expected the feeling of dissociation to wear off with the dizziness, but even after another twenty-five minutes in line, the altered state persisted.
When they came to the front of the line, Mel and Kit got in the backseat of the boxy, old-fashioned car. Mitzi and Coo sat up front, where a Disney engineering genius had placed two nonfunctional steering wheels, on the off chance that little siblings might argue over who gets the driver’s seat.
The doors spanked closed behind them, and the car lurched and swerved on its track, bumping through solid walls, narrowly avoiding disasters. Mitzi bounced and clapped, squealing with delight. Kit wanted to tell her to sit still, but a cartoon bank robber leaped out and caught her attention away from her mother’s hand on her back. Mel laughed and pointed, his features exaggerated and dimensionless as the caricature hoodlums, dogs, and demons populating the black-lit inner world of Mr. Toad.
As they paused outside on the immaculate sidewalk, Mitzi and Coo got autographs from Chip and Dale, and Mel crossed another ride off his list.
“Okay, I think we’ve hit most of the biggies. Pirates of the Caribbean?”
“Check!” Mitzi and Cooper had been going over the list all day.
“Big Thunder Mountain Railroad?”
“Check!”
“Swiss Family Tree House? Mad Hatter’s Tea Party?”
“Check and check!”
“Small World?”
“Not gonna happen!” they chorused in Mel-speak, and he rewarded them with a thumbs up. “Alien Encounter?”
“Check for me and Dad!” Cooper called, adding, “That was so rad.”
Mitzi clouded over. She hadn’t measured up to the inflexible line on the height restriction podium, but Mel quickly came back with extra enthusiasm especially for her.
“Dumbo’s Flying Circus?”
“Check me, but not Coo!” she clapped and brightened, bouncing on the blistering hot concrete.
“Let’s see. It’s two-twenty. We still want to hit Space Mountain, Hall of Presidents, Haunted Mansion—”
“Haunted Mansion!” Cooper begged. “Haunted Mansion next!”
“Mel, maybe we could get some lunch pretty soon,” Kit said, but that brought up a disappointed chorus.
“How about right after the Haunted Mansion?” Mel suggested.
“Sure,” Kit nodded.
She was giving in on everything these days, feeling that she’d used up all her brownie points and no longer had the right to an opinion.
“You’re not going to be too scared, are you, Mama?”
“I don’t know,” Kit said. “Sounds pretty scary.”
She reached down and grasped Mitzi’s sweaty hand to keep her from dancing and prancing off all her energy. She didn’t want Mel to have to carry her in this heat.
There was a little shade at the entrance to the Haunted Mansion, and as they crowded into it, Kit felt Mel’s hands on her shoulders. She let herself lean back against him. The plain largeness of him was so comforting sometimes. He made her feel like she was living in a solid brick house with a firm foundation, which of course she was, because Mel was working overtime to pay the mortgage.
“Are you okay?” he asked her again.
“Fine,” she said. “Just hungry.”
“We’ll get lunch right after this, I promise.”
“We could try that cafe with the alien lounge singer,” Kit suggested.
“Hey now,” Mel teased, “let’s leave your sister out of this.”
Kit tsked and swatted his arm. He kissed the back of her neck, and she leaned into him again. Thinking of Kiki made her feel so sad. The line moved forward somewhat. Mitzi and Coo bounced with anticipation.
“They’re gonna sleep like rocks tonight,” Mel whispered, wrapping his arms around her, allowing his thumb to discreetly caress the side of her breast. “Then you and I can take a nice long shower.”
Kit nodded. She didn’t care, as long as he kept feeding her regularly.
She started to feel a little better when they got inside the cool dark of the great Victorian house. They entered a large room filled with foreboding music and listened to a spooky narration tape as the floor descended. Or perhaps the roof was rising, Kit wasn’t sure, but the portraits on the wall began to transform.
Slowly, the frames around the stolid faces elongated to reveal the frightening and ridiculous secrets of the archetypal family. A gentleman in his dapper waistcoat gradually exposed bright-colored boxer shorts, then the fact that he was standing in this state of undress on the shoulders of another man. A frilly young woman was discovered to be walking on a tightrope; then the frame dropped even lower to unveil a ravenous crocodile just inches below her dainty feet. With the disclosure of their imperiled bodies, the complacent tintype expressions took on the tragic quality of grotesque theatrical masks, beneath which writhed a host of inappropriate emotions.
When it came time to get into the shell-shaped cars, Mel made Mitzi and Cooper share.
“Nope,” he raised his daddy-hand to halt their objections. “I’m sitting with my best girl on this one. She might need to grab onto somebody, and I want to make sure it’s me!”
He laughed his big Mel laugh, large and hearty.
Kit felt the clammy breath of the crocodile beneath her sandals.
As the car rolled slowly through the gloom, past tombst
ones and ghoulies, Mel put his arm around Kit’s shoulder and nuzzled her neck, whispering more about her and him and the hotel shower. Phantom dancers holographed by below, their skirts silent as cobwebs, weaving in and around each other, past a banquet table of long-withered flowers and the decayed remains of a great feast. Kit closed her eyes, listening to Mel’s voice mingled with the sinister music until Mitzi’s scream jolted her back to herself.
Before them was a mirror. Kit saw herself and Mel in the shell-shaped vehicle, but seated between them was a greenish specter, leering and waving in the glass. Kit inhaled sharply.
“Gotcha, didn’t they?” Mel laughed. “It’s okay, Mitzi,” he called into the darkness. “It’s just pretend. It’s almost over.”
Back outside again, the sunlight pierced even more brilliantly, and the heat was that much more oppressive for the cool of the air-conditioned exit. Kit retraced their steps in her mind, trying to calculate how long it would take before she would be sitting down with food and water in front of her. Mitzi and Coo had been tanking up on cotton candy and other vacation extravagances all morning, so they weren’t begging or whining yet. Kit hoped she could depend on Mel’s formidable appetite to spur them on, but there was a show being performed on the stage in front of the castle, and then Pooh and his friends and Minnie and finally Mickey Mouse himself strolled by, gathering crowds of autograph seekers.
Mel waited patiently, camera in hand, for Mitzi and Cooper to get close enough to hug each character.
Kit shifted her heavy purse from shoulder to shoulder.
Move your ass, Tigger, I’m dyin’ here.
By the time they reached Tomorrowland, it was going on four o’clock, and Kit was woozy with sunburn and longing. A drink of water. A sandwich. A chair. Anything.
“Hey, look!” Mel pointed. “There’s hardly any line for Space Mountain!”
“Mel, I thought we were going to get something to eat.”