Hurt People

by Cote Smith

  “I have to go,” my dad said. “I’ve got Tony and Alan in the woods, but that’s all I got.”

  My mother said my dad’s name. “You have to find him,” she said. “He can’t be out there like that. With that man.”

  I peeked around the hall wall, just enough to see my dad put his hand to my mother’s hair. “I will bring him back,” he said.

  My mother nodded. She said she wanted to go with my dad. She said all the things victims said in those bad movies we’d seen, the words that before never meant a thing.

  My dad went to the door but stopped in the dark hall. “Aggie,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know.”

  “No, I mean, you shouldn’t be alone in this place, in this city. I never should have left.”

  My mother came out of the kitchen. But she didn’t go to my dad. She went to the sliding glass door and stared at the woods. “I know,” she said. “I know what you meant.”

  * * *

  I found my mom standing at the glass door, still in her club shirt from work. She hadn’t moved. The TV was on but the sound was off. A weatherman was pointing at various red blobs moving across the squares and rectangles that represented our corner of the state.

  “This is bad,” my mother said. “This is real bad.” A few fat drops hit the glass. I put my arms around her and rested my head on her side. “I don’t know whose fault this is,” she said. “Whose fault is this?”

  I knew I wasn’t supposed to say anything, so I just squeezed my mother tighter. Her shirt smelled like sweat and club cleaner. The sky flashed and there was a quick pop, like a bulb had gone out. Little time between light and sound. My mother pushed me away from the glass. “The storm is close,” she said. “We better watch the weather.”

  We sat on the couch and my mother put her arm around me. The weatherman zoomed in on our square. He pointed to the solid red mass southwest of us. He fast-forwarded the image behind him, showing us what our county would look like in a matter of minutes. What he showed was that our county wasn’t there. In its place was the red mass. The weatherman was doing his best to warn everyone. His gestures grew wilder, his eyes wider. But my mother and I couldn’t make ourselves care. We sat on the couch and knew whatever was happening out there, whatever was coming our way, was going to happen, and that nothing we could do would make it stop. All we could do was wait.

  * * *

  I woke up because someone was shaking me. I opened my eyes but it was as if I kept them closed. All the lights were out. The city’s siren blared.

  “Come on, we have to go,” my mother was saying. I was still on the couch. She struck a match and lit a candle. “This isn’t a test.”

  She got me on my feet and led me to the door. The siren was louder out in the hallway, bouncing off our building’s empty halls, the empty bedrooms. I couldn’t see anything except my mother’s worried face, yellow in the candle’s glow.

  The laundry room was humid and reeked of bleach. We were the only two down here. My mother pointed to a spot by a dryer. She didn’t have to tell me what to do next. We had practiced this drill many times in school. An alarm would sound and the teacher would jump at her desk, drop her chalk, and lead us away from the classroom windows and into the hall. We would line up against the wall and they would tell us to get down on our knees. Ball up. Put your face between your legs and cover your head. They called it the fetal position, but none of us knew what that meant, unless we had an older brother who was smart and would tell us if we asked nicely. Still, we did what the teachers said. We huddled until our knees hurt from the tile, until we grew tired of tasting our breath. When the drill was over and we were all back in the classroom, rubbing our necks and complaining, the teacher would say she was sorry. Some tornadoes like to take their time. But it’s for your own good. In this part of the country, a drill like this can save your life.

  “Stay down until I tell you,” my mother said. I peeked out of my position and saw the black shape of my mother, leaning on a washer, watching the storm light up the stairwell wall. The siren was fainter down here, but we could hear the dark sky grumble, low and without pause. I tucked my head and covered my ears to shut out all the noise. I imagined the red mass passing our complex, and let myself believe the storm was over, that if there was a tornado, it had somehow skipped the Frontiers. But when I uncovered my ears the wind still howled, louder than I had ever heard it before. The walls shook and creaked, like a large hand was slowly wrenching out each nail. I looked for my mother again. She blew out the candle, got down, and balled herself up next to me. She started saying things, words I couldn’t quite make out. I scooted closer so I could hear her. I put my head next to hers. Please, she said. Please. She wasn’t talking to me. She was praying.

  Something shattered. I heard the spray of broken glass. It was the stairwell window, finally giving in to the wind. The outside grew even louder, the low grumble now a relentless roar. In class, the day of each drill, we asked our teachers what it was like. What’s it really like to be in a tornado? And each teacher had her own tale, her own set of memories. A green sky. A cloud like an infinite wall. But they all had one thing in common. When they described the sound of the tornado, it was always the same. It’s like a train, they would say. The shaking of the earth, the whistle of the wind. It’s like someone laid tracks right where you live. You didn’t notice because you were busy. Maybe you were at school or at work. Maybe you were picking up the kids. But when you finally did figure it out, when you heard the warning, it was too late. The train was coming through and you couldn’t get out of the way.

  My mother put her arm around me and pulled me into her. She covered my entire body with hers and whispered things I couldn’t hear over the train’s violent whistle. But they were nice things. They felt good in my ear. They got me away from my imagination, from thinking about what would happen if the roof fell, if the tornado picked me up and threw me somewhere nobody would ever find. Curled over me, my mother only let me think about her. We rode the train out like that.

  * * *

  The tornado went away before the siren did. The whistle faded. The walls rested. I asked my mother if it was safe. “Wait,” she said. She stood, but kept her shoe on my back so I wouldn’t move. The siren eventually died, restoring our apartment’s silence. “OK,” my mother said, “you can get up.”

  She helped me to my feet, and I followed her to the stairs. The lights flickered on and off, and it wasn’t long before we saw the first sign of damage. At the ground level the window above the building’s pea-green door was missing. The door itself hung by one hinge. I didn’t have my shoes on, so my mother picked me up, carried me over the broken glass, and set me safely on the hall carpet. Be careful, she said.

  Upstairs, the pictures of flowers had been knocked off the wall, their frames broken. We hurried into our apartment. The electricity was out completely, so my mother lit each of us a candle. Let’s see what’s left, she said, and floated into the darkness. I took my candle and went my own way. From what I could see, everything looked the same. The bookcase stood, the encyclopedias were still in place. The sliding glass door remained closed, locked and intact. I walked into the kitchen. The square table hadn’t moved either. My cereal bowl was right where I left it.

  “It missed us,” I said, out of shock, and went back into the living room, where my mother was looking up.

  “No, it didn’t,” she said. She held her candle up to a gigantic crack in the ceiling, running diagonally corner to corner, spanning the entire living room. We could hear the wind breathing through the opening, invading our apartment. “This isn’t safe,” my mother said. “We have to go.”

  “Where?” I said. “Rick’s?”

  I didn’t know why I said that, why I had guessed Rick’s. I hadn’t even thought about it, but now that the option was out there, the choice hung in front of us, a fork in the road.

  “No,” she said. “It’ll have to be your dad’s. For now.”

&
nbsp; “Why?” I said.

  She looked at the ceiling’s crack again, put her hand up to feel the cool air. “Because,” she said. “Now go to your room and grab some things. And be quick.”

  * * *

  When I opened the door to my room, I knew I would never live there again. There was no way. The gigantic crack from the living room tracked across our ceiling too, and the bedroom window was completely gone. In its place was a black square of night, through which a chill air seeped in. My brother’s bunk bed had been knocked off mine and lay on its side in the middle of the floor. I picked up his blanket and wrapped it around me. The outside temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees. In what was left of our ruined room, I realized I hadn’t cried yet, about anything. I hadn’t taken the time. But here, among the wreckage, I let the tears go.

  When I was done, I put my shoes on and made my way around the mess. I tried not to look at what was once the room I shared with my brother, or think anymore about what this all meant. That time is over, I told myself, and packed my bag like I was going to stay the weekend with my dad. This is a normal weekend, I thought. This is an ordinary life.

  * * *

  On our way to my dad’s we saw a glimpse of what the tornado had done. The damage it had left behind. Tall trees were shredded to splinters. Street signs lay broken, or spiked into front yards. The farther we drove, the more we realized how random the destruction was. How none of it made sense. The city would be pitch-black one block, perfectly lit the next. On one street every house had its roof ripped off. Then we took a left and everything seemed fine.

  “What about the prisons?” I said. I imagined the tornado knocking down prison walls, letting loose the country’s worst. I imagined the Stranger waving at his former roommates, laughing and saying our time has come.

  “I’m sure they’re fine,” my mother said. “Those buildings are very old. In a time like this, a prison is probably the safest place to be.”

  From what we could see that night, it seemed she was right. None of the prisons had lost power. The federal penitentiary still shone on its hill, loomed over the rest of the city. Other personal landmarks weren’t as lucky. The city’s grocery store had a parked car flipped through its front. At the city park, the tornado slide was bent in half, into an L. On almost every street we drove we saw debris, broken bits of somebody’s property. Pieces of someone’s life.

  “This isn’t half of it,” my mother said. “We won’t know how bad it really is until morning.”

  We turned onto my dad’s street. The old people’s home was still standing, though its fence, the one my brother and I once hit home runs over, was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t until we were four duplexes away from my dad’s that we found it, coiled across the street like a big metal snake. We got out of the van and tried to move it, but we weren’t strong enough, and no one came out to help. We left the van parked on the side and walked the rest of the way.

  My dad’s duplex was fine. The door was locked when I tried it, but my mother had a key. My dad had given it to her a long time ago, she said. Just in case.

  We went inside and I felt like I had to show my mother around. So I showed her the kitchen, the grill out back, which miraculously hadn’t moved. I took her upstairs and showed her my dad’s room, the unmade bed where he slept. I figured she might want to go to sleep soon. I thought she was tired like me.

  “I can’t sleep now,” she said. “But you can show me where you sleep. Maybe I’ll lie next to you for a bit.”

  I took her downstairs, into the basement. I turned on the lamp and gestured toward my bed. A big daddy longlegs ran across the bedspread and disappeared under my pillow.

  “You sleep here?” my mother said.

  I found the spider and let it crawl on my hand. “It’s not that bad.”

  “It’s not that good, either,” my mother said. She sat next to me on the bed. “You’re so quiet.” She brushed my bowl-shaped hair. “Don’t you ever get scared?”

  I lay down and thought about the question. I thought about what I felt when my brother and I were with Chris. I tried to remember how scared I was, but I couldn’t. I thought of my brother out in the woods, alone or worse. I pictured Chris catching my brother, the two of them taking shelter in the silo. I imagined the tornado coming and taking Chris away. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t picture my brother coming back. I couldn’t imagine what he would be like.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  My mother put her head on the pillow next to me. She put one arm behind her head and wrapped me in the other.

  fifteen

  MY MOTHER WOKE ME. It was morning, though it looked the same in the basement. We went upstairs and there was no one there. My dad’s police cruiser was not out front.

  My mother made me an egg-and-cheese sandwich for breakfast. While I ate, I tried to remember pieces of the things I dreamed. But there was nothing I could hold on to. That world had fled, faded away. Now there was just the world in front of me, in which my mother sat watching me eat. Marveling at every bite like it was a small miracle. I tried not to stare back, not for too long. I stole glances at her makeup-less face, her dry, small eyes. When I was finished she put my plate in the sink and ran water over the yolk that had broken free of the egg and hardened. Something clogged the drain and I could hear the water slowly rise, forming a small pool.

  “Go get your shoes,” my mother said. “We need to move the van.”

  * * *

  When I returned from grabbing my shoes in the basement, my mother wasn’t waiting by the door. She was in the kitchen, looking in the fridge. I asked her what she was looking for. “Nothing,” she said, and quickly slammed the door shut. She looked at me, then out the kitchen window, at me again. “Let’s go. I have to get out of here.”

  Outside it was cold enough for a small jacket. The temperature had stayed down after the tornado. Dew wet the grass, and a thin fog descended on my dad’s street. Summer was ending early. Once in the van I didn’t know where my mother was taking me, but I didn’t ask. It felt wrong to say more words than I had to. She drove with the radio off and I did my best to keep my mind blank, to not think about the empty basement back at my dad’s place.

  After we got onto Main Street, it became easier to think about things besides my brother. Because my mother was right: the tornado’s damage was different in the light. The streets that had been without power the night before, the ones hidden in the dark, were the streets hit the hardest. Entire houses were crumbled, their frames warped and broken. Trees lay atop smashed cars, and random yards burned. Strangers walked up and down their once familiar neighborhoods, like zombies that had arisen from the dead after decades underground, who clawed their way out of their graves only to find everything they knew beyond recognition.

  More than once we were forced to detour. On our way to wherever it was we were going. My mother sped from one street to another as though we were being chased, and as soon as we thought we had escaped, a mountain of debris blocked our way. My mother punched the steering wheel each time we were cut off, made a U-turn, and peeled out in the opposite direction. This happened several times, until eventually we pulled into an unharmed gas station, with a liquor store attached. I couldn’t remember being here before. My mother put the van in park.

  “It’s not open,” she said. “After all that.”

  I looked where she was looking, at the Open sign, cursive and unlit. The insides of both stores were dark and unmoving. My mother slumped in her seat and closed her eyes. She started to cry. Loudly and without shame. Then, suddenly, she stopped, and although I thought she would feel better, she didn’t.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” she said. “You should have said something.”

  I turned from the window and faced my mother, her blue eyes reddened with sadness and disbelief. “This man, this Chris—all this time! You could have stopped him! Why didn’t you tell anyone what was going on?”

  “I didn’t know.”r />
  “What do you mean you didn’t know? Of course you knew.”

  I shook my head, the only thing my body would do.

  “Oh, well, that’s great,” she said. “That helps a lot. You didn’t know and look what happened.”

  She started crying again and I felt my mouth open. My cheeks tightened, but nothing fell. I stared at my mother, knowing I could offer nothing.

  A car horn gave a quick honk from behind. I turned and saw it was a police cruiser. My dad’s. He got out and walked the few steps to the driver’s side, like we’d violated some rule of the road and he was finally ready to take us in.

  “We’re still looking,” he said. “But we’re stretched thin because of the storm.” I could hear the tired in his voice. From being in the woods all night. Calling out my brother’s name, again and again with no reply.

  “So what are you doing here?” my mother said.

  “I saw you driving around. This street’s closed, you know.”

  “No, I mean what are you doing here? Why aren’t you out there? What the hell are you waiting for?”

  “C’mon,” my dad said, touching my mom’s shoulder, “let’s get you home.”

  She jerked away from him. “No! That’s not what I need. I need you to be out there. I need you to find him.”

  “We will. Just—”

  “Then do it! For God’s sake, do something right for once in your life.”

  My dad’s hand dropped. He backed away. For a moment, he looked like he’d been shot. The color left his face and his breathing stopped.

  “Aggie,” he said.