by Cameron Lowe
She wanted to join him in the effort, but Marley needed care and Roslyn was still so young. They agreed that though her maternity leave from the shelter was unpaid, she should take full advantage of it while she could. They both carried a lot of guilt over Winnie’s first year and neither wanted to have to make that kind of financial decision again.
Reckless though Gwen knew it was, cutting out the pills was one way she could help contribute. So Malcolm never knew the difference, she swapped in acetaminophen cut into halves instead, telling herself it was probably healthier for Marley anyways. If she didn’t panic, if she could keep her stress in check, if she could remember her breathing exercises and not go to bed worried at night about Malcolm’s health, their marriage, the kids’ needs, or their utterly depleted savings, she could manage the seizures.
In retrospect, it was the dumbest decision she’d ever made.
* * *
When Gwen went back to work, Daphne and Juliet took over the babysitting duties. Daphne harrumphed some at not getting the kids five days a week, but Gwen liked the idea of the kids getting to spend some time with their cousin fifty-eight times removed. Malcolm’s schedule lined up closer to Winnie’s school hours, and he generally drove her save the days when Gwen just needed her fix of her oldest daughter, or vice versa.
Usually when she was done with school, Winnie would get a ride from her dad to her grandparents’. He’d worked things out with Dinah at the beginning of Win’s entry into first grade to move his lunch hour way back, something she was grateful for at noon when the place was slammed the hardest. That day, though, Gwen had gone into work two hours early to help out with a booth at a community expo and would be getting off early to compensate, so they decided she’d pick up Winnie and the babies.
It was good to see her mom for a few minutes, to talk about Hugh and their own lives. All too often Gwen realized just how much of her life’s responsibilities had become her mother’s, and she felt a little guilty about that, just as she did whenever she thought about how much work she’d caused Malcolm to miss for her hospital visits. Daphne foisted some leftovers on her, boxed up a dozen other items she thought Malcolm and Gwen might need, and saw her and the kids out to the Camry. Gwen honked when she pulled away, saddened a bit by the long locks of gray her mom was no longer trying to hide.
As they drove, Gwen asked, “What do you think, Winnie? Burgers or fish for dinner?”
“Hamburgers!” Winnie shouted, bouncing happily in her car seat. Her siblings were in their own car seats facing backwards. She was so proud of being able to face forward. Gwen had tasked her early on with the “solemn” duty of keeping her brother and sister entertained and taken care of when she was riding with them, and it was something Winnie took very seriously.
“Hamburgers?” Gwen asked, making a show of wrinkling her nose. “But don’t you love fish?”
Winnie shouted, “Nooooo!’ and giggled.
“Well, then, to the bread store we shall go to pick up buns, my little dancer.”
Gwen focused on the road again, smiling. The bread store was one of her and Malcolm’s favorite budget finds. For five bucks, they could select a variety of nearly out-of-date breads, rolls, and buns from a discounted shelf. They could then take it all home, double wrap the bread in older bags, and freeze what they couldn’t use immediately for later. Given how much bread the adults went through, it became a frequent stop for them on paydays.
Oh, right, the leftovers. She and Malcolm could take them to work. He’d be happy about the beef stew and turkey pot pie. Actually, put anything homemade in front of Malcolm and he was a happy camper. What they once had thought were finicky eating habits on Winnie’s part, they were starting to fear were actual allergies. Whenever she downed something with soy, she was sick for hours afterward. Same with pecans, though she did great with peanuts. At least she was relatively healthy apart from that. Gwen feared every day one of the kids would begin to show signs of her seizures or her susceptibility to diseases. Roslyn came down with the croup often, but that had cleared up in recent months and she’d been just fine, apart from a sniffly, mild cold that worked its way through the whole family.
Caught up in thoughts about her kids’ health, Gwen approached a yellow light behind a slowing pickup.
Blink.
Gwen stared straight at a white car coming straight at her. Canted at a strange angle, her head nearly against the window, she had no time to think, and jerked the wheel back towards the lane she’d just drifted from. The truck was there, right there, the driver nonsensically hammering his horn, and she had just enough time to scream Winnie’s name on instinct before she crashed into it.
* * *
“Mommy?” Winnie wailed. “Wake up! Please wake up!”
Gwen came up out of a soup to red. She blinked, but something was in her eyes. She wiped at them, her vision clearing just enough to see blood smeared all over her hands, and she sucked in a breath, because all at once, she realized what had happened.
She unbuckled and twisted in her seat, but metal or plastic had dented and folded and she banged her knee against it. “Winnie? Jesus, are you okay? Are the babies okay?”
Winnie nodded frantically, tears rolling down her face. Roslyn was screaming, but Marley wasn’t making a peep. Gwen could barely make out the obstruction in her way and scraped her leg as she jerked out of her chair and clambered onto the center console. “Marley?” she whispered, unable to breathe, to think. “Marley!” she screamed.
Her infant woke, and woke screaming. Gwen sucked in a great big gasp of breath, and then there were people there, jerking open her door with a squeal of metal and the pop of glass breaking.
“Holy shit, lady, you okay?” a man asked.
“She got babies!” someone yelled. It sounded to Gwen like it was coming through water. Her head was so fuzzy and it was hard to concentrate.
Like this, she couldn’t reach her kids, so Gwen jerked back out of the car, cutting her leg so severely she’d later need over seventy stitches. Blood gushed down past her ankles and into her shoes but she didn’t notice. In that moment, she was unstoppable. She was a superhero. She was one hundred and forty pounds of maternal fear and she did not care about a paltry thing like a life-threatening leg wound. Gwen stumbled out of the car, shoving the big cowboy she’d crashed into out of the way as she grabbed the handle for the rear passenger door. It didn’t want to give, but she held on tight and jerked once, twice, three times and it finally popped. Behind the seats were Roslyn and Marley, and neither were bleeding, but in the middle was Winnie, and crimson slid down her arm.
Gwen screamed her name.
She jerked at the buckles on Marley’s car seat, freeing him and pulling the whole seat out. The cowboy took him gently from her, and someone was coming around the other side, working the other door. Gwen slid into the car, checking Winnie frantically for injuries to her neck or her spine. Her daughters were crying, but once she was out of the buckles, Winnie pulled herself out of her own chair. Gwen got her out of the car before she ducked her head back in and saw an older woman working Roslyn’s buckles.
“I think she’s okay,” the other woman shouted, caught up in the moment.
And she was. Light-headed and losing a lot of blood, Gwen spun around and knelt next to Winnie. A long but shallow cut ran down her oldest daughter’s arm. The cowboy hurried back to his truck and pulled out a first aid kit.
“You need to let me put some pressure on that leg,” he told Gwen, but she shook her head frantically.
“Winnie first,” she panted, her eyes still wild.
“But-”
Gwen jerked the gauze from him, unspooled it, and clamped it to her daughter’s arm. A wave of nausea and dizziness washed over her, and she fell to one knee. “It’s… okay, baby,” she muttered, and collapsed into darkness again.
Chapter 38
The kids got off lucky. Gwen, not so much. She already walked with a slight limp from the severity of the broken leg
she’d suffered nearly a decade prior, but now she hobbled, even after the stitches came out and the leg wound healed. She would forever be unable to run right again, and could only manage a speedy walk with effort. When she wasn’t carrying Roslyn or Marley, she walked that first year after with a cane. It made her feel like she was always slowing her family down, another in a long list of growing guilts.
What made things even worse was that Malcolm didn’t get mad when he found out about the pills. Instead, by her bedside in the hospital after she got out of surgery and came up out of her haze long enough to tell him about the meds she hadn’t been taking, Malcolm took her hand and kissed it, opting to say nothing for the time being.
Even later, when she was back home and settling into her new physical normal, Malcolm was nothing but patient. It didn’t seem like a mask, either. Sometimes, there was no point in yelling, or being mad or even upset. Sometimes you just had to wake up, go to work, come home, and be. And that was what Malcolm did. He talked to Dr. Ditmore and brought home her seizure meds. When she asked where he got the money, he told her tonelessly the credit card. She protested at that, but he told her softly and firmly debt was temporary. Her life, and the lives of their children, was far, far more important than the balance on a sheet. It was the closest he came to getting angry with her. When he kissed her forehead and held her against him, it did more to break her than if he’d screamed his head off at her.
She could no longer drive. They made the decision together. Not until the children could ride a bus to school or they could work something out otherwise with their transportation. Gwen, it was agreed, would never step foot behind the wheel of a car again with their children in it. They knew they’d been extremely lucky. Both she and Winnie suffered nightmares about the crash, but their daughter got the brunt of the terror. She would wake up screaming in the middle of the night, her bed wet, and after they cleaned up and she changed, her parents would put her in bed with them, and she’d find some small solace in their presence.
Gwen getting fired seemed almost trivial in comparison to all the other repercussions. The shelter never said as much – their reasons were that they were downsizing and Gwen was an unfortunate but necessary cut – but she was not an idiot and knew her constant health problems had to be the reason she was let go. She wandered through the place one last time, saying goodbye to all the animals she’d never see again, and waited outside on the same stone bench where she’d said goodbye to Charlie and Hugh, feeling like her whole world was slowly imploding.
Juliet, Malcolm, and Alicia helped her to weeks of job interviews. It was wrong to say no one was hiring – there was entry-level work just a stone’s throw away in a city the size of Rankin Flats – but the veterinary clinics weren’t hiring and most of the shelters could only pay her minimum wage. She ended up taking on two jobs, one working at the front desk for a hotel, the other as a clerk for a furniture store.
Their debt reached new heights. The cost of fixing the Camry far outweighed its usefulness to them, and they junked it at a stupidly steep price. Gwen gave up on her seizure meds entirely, to Malcolm’s frustration, but it did help them financially, at least for the short term. They began to tighten their belts in every way possible, but the damn credit cards, combined with the never-ending hospital bills, loomed over them. When it came time for the holidays, they no longer gave a thought as to traveling. They could barely afford the gas for Malcolm to take care of the kids and get to work.
At home, Gwen never felt further away from Malcolm. He laughed with them, played games with them, was a sweet and caring husband and father, but at night, in the dark, the energy to make love diminished, and sometimes she caught him staring out windows when he thought no one was looking, and in those moments, there was such a weariness and sadness to him it began to break her heart and her mind. They had always been a close couple, a tag team even in the worst of things, but now it felt like they were starting to walk two different roads parallel to one another. She desperately did not want to lose him, but she could not find a voice to talk about her fears, because guilt could choke the words in a person’s throat.
Slowly the next few years played themselves out like a horror movie – for them, and for Rankin Flats.
* * *
Like everyone else within the city, in 2016, Gwen and Malcolm thought the tornado warnings would just lead to a near miss, or a leveling of a few farms, same as they suffered through every year.
At Matto Furio’s, the power went out in the afternoon. Moments later, air raid sirens they’d only heard in alarm tests began to peal all across the city, making him and most everyone else jump. Malcolm stepped out to the dining area. He and the servers ushered folks to the exit, holding open the doors for what little light the green skies could provide. Someone outside shouted, “Oh my God, that’s coming straight for the city,” and then everyone was outside, staff and customers alike.
At first, Malcolm didn’t realize what he was seeing. He thought it was just a swirling mass of clouds with a cloud wall chasing them. His mind refused to acknowledge the funnel cloud for what it was, because if what he was seeing was real, that meant most of the horizon was dominated by it. He’d never seen a tornado that huge, never dreamed such a thing was even possible. No one within recorded history had.
“Oh Jesus,” someone whispered.
“Holy. Shit!” a kid said. His mother, standing behind him, didn’t say a word about his cursing. She herself was staring up at the sky, too numb, too terrified to pay him any attention.
Gwen.
Malcolm fumbled for his cell phone and dropped it, the screen cracking on impact. He asked if he could borrow someone’s, but no one was listening. As the air stilled in the moments before the downdraft dropped, he could hear everything for blocks around. Engines running. The bang of a door. A plastic bag rustling. Someone’s radio blocks away.
People shouting.
And as the funnel cloud formed, people screaming.
His mind caught up to the moment, and Malcolm’s eyes bulged. “Get inside!” he shouted. “Into the kitchens, the bathrooms! Go! Go go go!”
No one except the woman and the kid and a few of the staff listened. The rest scattered, or stayed put, too enthralled to move. Malcolm backed up towards the store, his eyes locked on that impossibly huge funnel cloud as it swirled not outside the city in the plains, but deep in the guts of Rankin Flats.
* * *
Half a city away, Gwen stared up at the same sight, but her mind worked faster than Malcolm’s and she limped back inside the furniture store as fast as she could, not for safety, but for the keys they kept in a drawer for the delivery trucks.
She’d never driven one of them before but she knew the basics from the time she moved with Calvin. Her boss shouted after her to come back, but her mind was fixated on three little faces, all of whom were too fucking far away. Gwen banged into the emergency door leading out to the loading dock, setting off an alarm deep within the store, but she didn’t care about anything but getting to her babies.
The truck sputtered to life, but Gwen snuffed it when she gave it too much gas. She gritted her teeth, tried again, and the transmission ground so hard it rattled her fingers. On the third time, she finally got it, and lurched out of the parking lot. No one ran after her. In the opening salvo of the tornado, an employee borrowing a company truck seemed pretty minor.
The furniture store sat just a few miles from the outskirts of Morristown, the same suburb where her parents lived, Traffic fleeing the city was at a standstill, and in their panic, people abandoned their cars and fled for shelter even though they were dozens and dozens of miles from the epicenter. Gwen wasn’t heading out of the city, but towards it. Traffic was still bad but she knew these roads well and stuck to back alleys and old forgotten routes, her eyes never leaving the road despite the tornado still doing its worst in the distance. Twice she was nearly hit by debris, the first time by a chunk of concrete the size of a man, the second a long steel
beam that speared a parked car just twenty yards away. It was empty, thank God, but she felt the earth actually shudder from the impact, even through the truck’s rumbling engine, and quietly, fervently, she prayed, not for her safety, but that of her family and all the people of the city.
By the time she reached her parents’ house, the first tornado had swept far east. The wind had come back and hammered the side of the truck unmercifully. If she hadn’t been so focused on getting to her children, she might have feared it tipping over. In the driveway, she barely took the time to grab the keys out of the ignition before she was out the door and jumping to the ground below. Her dad jerked open the front door and ran out to her, grabbing her arm and guiding her into the house. Only inside did she actually realize she’d been unable to hear Elliot yell at her over the wind, because now she heard her babies – all her babies – screaming and crying, utterly terrified, and Gwen wanted nothing so much but to join them.
When they thought the worst was over, Elliot returned to a window and gasped before stumbling backwards. Gwen started towards the window but he shouted, “Stay back!”
She saw it just as he had – a second tornado’s massive funnel cloud, further away to the south, but still above the city. Like over a million others in the Flats, the full realization of what was happening hit Gwen and she spun away from the windows, needing her children with her, needing to tell them she loved them in case it was the last time she could, because in her heart it felt like the end times had come.
They hadn’t, but the devastation to the city was nothing short of apocalyptic.
Malcolm managed to make it to Elliot and Daphne’s by midnight. Traffic within the city had been shut down, and he needed to skirt the suburbs to reach them, eventually abandoning the van in a fast food restaurant’s parking lot to jog the rest of the way. Sweaty, exhausted, and on the verge of a heart attack, he gasped Gwen’s name when he came through the door, and she leapt to greet him, to wrap him up and refuse to let him go.