The Stormchasers

by Jenna Blum

  Dr. Brewster smiles and shakes her head. “Man,” she says. “I can’t even imagine it. I’m from Florida, and I thought we had storms there, but they’re nothing like they are here. I’m a real baby about it too, I’ll admit. The second that tornado siren goes off, I’m under the table.”

  “Me too,” says Karena, quite truthfully. She thanks the doctor again and steps into the hall off the ward.

  4

  When Karena leaves the hospital it is noon, the sun sizzling down on Wichita. Karena drives her rental car a block over to a sandwich shop on the first floor of a skyscraper. She gets a veggie sub to ward off a hunger headache and shows Charles’s mullet photo to the counter staff. They exclaim over the hairstyle and tux, but they haven’t seen him. While she eats her sandwich Karena searches the Internet for all convenience stores, gas stations, and fast-food joints within a ten-mile radius. These are the places a stormchaser on the move would visit before heading out, and Karena spends the rest of the afternoon connecting the dots from one to the next. If only she could get some idea of Charles’s trajectory! Although maybe he lives here, Karena thinks in despair, driving from Conoco to Exxon, McDonald’s to Arby’s. She expands her search to sit-down restaurants where Charles might work, then to the motels. Everywhere the mullet photo elicits admiring comments made with varying degrees of irony, but no recognition.

  By the time Karena pulls into the lot of her own motel, The Sunflower Inn & Suites, out by the Wichita airport, her hair smells deep-fried and she is exhausted. The sun is descending over the service road; it’s six forty-five P.M., prime time for the Dreads. Karena’s mood is probably worse today because of the past twenty-four hours, but still, this low, scared feeling falls on her every evening between four and seven, no matter where she is, no matter whom she’s with. Her ex-husband used to make light of the Dreads, to say they were why cocktail hour was invented. Karena’s former therapist, Dr. B, said they were a circadian response in some people, a natural reaction to the withdrawal of the light. All Karena knows is that this is when she feels most alone, most unconnected and sad. As she checks in to The Sunflower Inn & Suites, Karena reflects as she often does on how strange it is that her twin’s disorder is one of just this: moods, the shifting emotional weather healthy people take for granted.

  She shares the elevator to the third floor with a family fresh from the pool, the husband’s face pink and impassive beneath his feed cap, the children whacking each other with foam noodles around Karena’s legs. “Stop that,” the mother hisses and pincers them in the tender spot between shoulder and neck. Karena smiles down at the children, who turn instantly silent and sullen. With their limber little bodies and chlorine-stiff white hair, they remind Karena of herself and Charles.

  In her room Karena does a quick sweep perfected over years of traveling on assignment. She yanks the sunflowered nylon coverlet onto the floor, whisks the sunflowered drapes aside, and karate-chops the yellow shower curtain, jumping away each time in case something unpleasant pops out. Nothing does. Good. Karena is not fussy, but she draws the line at live insects, hair that isn’t hers, and suspicious stains. She once stayed in a B&B that had toenail clippings in the bed. Luckily, The Sunflower Inn & Suites, though a little kitschy, is spotlessly clean. Karena scrubs her face, orders a chicken sandwich from room service, puts on the Weather Channel with the sound muted. These routine tasks having been attended to, she settles on the bed with her cell phone. It’s times like this she misses being married, having somebody who among other things would be obligated to help her during crises. But Karena has been divorced long enough, eight years, to know this kind of thinking is a trap, that she misses the idea of Michael more than she misses Michael. And it is her fear of exactly this crisis that eroded their marriage, though Michael didn’t know it. Karena still can’t imagine Michael and Charles in the same room, especially if Charles is manic. No way. It is far too risky.

  Karena calls Tiff for the third time that day, saying, “Where are you?” when Tiff’s cell phone goes straight to voice mail. “It’s eight o’clock, do you know where your best friend is? Still in Wichita. Did you get my earlier messages?” She drops her voice for dramatic emphasis. “Charles . . . has . . . resurfaced,” she says, then sighs. “Except now he’s gone again. Call me when you have time. Sorry about missing the martinis.”

  Then, having put it off to the point when she no longer can, Karena dials her dad’s wife—Karena can never think of the Widow as a step-mother. This is a very long shot, since Karena isn’t sure whether Charles knows their dad married again, or what Frank’s condition is, or even that their mom, Siri, died in 2000. He certainly didn’t show up for Siri’s funeral. Or Frank’s wedding to the Widow. Nor has Karena ever encountered Charles at the New Heidelburg Good Samaritan Center, the nursing home where Frank is spinning out the rest of his days. It therefore seems unlikely that Charles would have tried to contact Frank now and been redirected to the Widow—but Karena suspects maybe, if her brother’s hurting enough, he would have tried to go home, not knowing that home isn’t there anymore. Besides, she has exhausted all other options.

  The phone rings and rings in the Widow’s restored Victorian, which Karena entertains herself by mentally revisiting as she waits. The army of stone creatures, squirrels and chipmunks mostly, peeking from the front bushes. The cardboard lady bent over in the garden, presenting her polka-dotted underpants to visitors. The boy and girl trolls kissing over the plastic wishing well in the yard. The sign on the porch announcing THE HALLINGDAHLS, FRANK~N~LOIS. As much as Karena wants to find her brother, she almost hopes Charles hasn’t learned of Frank’s remarriage and stroke, hasn’t been to the Widow’s house. It might just push him over the edge.

  Karena is just about to give up and try again later—maybe the Widow is at bridge night—when the Widow answers.

  “Helloooooo,” she says, putting an extra-cozy spin on the -o.

  “Lois? It’s Karena.”

  “Oh!” the Widow says, and there’s a muffled clatter as if she has just dropped an armload of cutlery in the sink and is stirring it around. “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Karena hears her muttering.

  “I’m sorry, who’d you say this is?” the Widow says. “You’ve caught me doing supper dishes.”

  “It’s Karena.”

  “Oh,” the Widow says. “Karena.”

  The line ticks. Karena waits for the Widow to continue, to say Hi, how are you, and tries to remember the woman isn’t all bad. The Widow has plenty of reasons to be angry, none having anything to do with Karena. But Karena can’t help picturing the Widow in her kitchen, in which everything matches: yellow gingham border entwined with vines, yellow gingham dish towels, yellow gingham vinyl on the chair seats. The Widow will be standing by the sink, round and poised as a doll, her little mouth smiling sweetly and poisonously at nobody.

  “Well!” the Widow says finally. “This is a surprise. What can I do for you? It’s a little late for a social call, isn’t it?”

  Karena looks out the window at the sunset, atomic peach striping the sky. The bedside clock says eight fifteen.

  “I guess,” she says. “Sorry, Lois. I didn’t mean to disturb your evening. But I’m looking for my brother. Charles. You haven’t heard from him by any chance, have you?”

  There is a frosty pause.

  “No,” the Widow says.

  “He hasn’t been looking for my dad? Nobody’s seen him around town?”

  “No,” the Widow repeats. “Although, you know, I’m not sure I’d even recognize him. It’s been so many years since anyone here has seen him.”

  Karena closes her eyes and massages them.

  “I know what you mean,” she says. “But if anyone you think might be Charles does show up, any strange guy on your doorstep, would you let me know right away, please? It’s urgent.”

  “Okay,” the Widow says.

  “Let me give you my cell number.”

  “Oh, goodness no,” the Widow says brightly. “I cou
ldn’t possibly remember. Even if I write it down, I’ve got so many numbers floating around already, what with my kids and grandkids and all, it’s a wonder my head’s still screwed on straight! Say,” she adds, “did you get the birthday card I sent you?”

  Oh, crap, Karena thinks. She did indeed receive a card from the Widow, a week ago. It featured a cartoon teddy bear in a striped hat dusted with sparkles and a banner reading For You Hunny Bear on Your Special Day! The Widow had also enclosed a check made out for thirty-nine dollars, Karena’s age plus a year to grow on. On the memo line in her former schoolteacher’s round cursive she had written Frank’s daughter’s birthday. The card itself was unsigned.

  “I did get it, Lois,” Karena says, “it was a lovely card, thank you very much.”

  “Oh, good,” says the Widow in her sweet little croaky voice. “I was worried you hadn’t received it. The mail up there in the Cities can be so unreliable, especially when money’s involved. . . . And when I hadn’t heard from you, I just assumed . . . But now I know you got it, so I’ll sleep better at night.”

  “That’s good,” says Karena.

  “I brought it to the Center to show your dad before I sent it,” the Widow continues. “I could tell he thought it was real nice.”

  Karena tries not to remember Frank as she last saw him a month ago, listing sideways in his wheelchair, his pink scalp visible through the cobwebs of his hair. Utterly unresponsive no matter how Karena pressed his hands and smiled and talked to him. One eye staring at the birds hopping and chirping in the nursing home’s lobby aviary, the other fixed straight ahead.

  “How’s he doing this week?” Karena asks.

  “Oh, the same,” the Widow says. “Of course, if you’d come down, you could see for yourself. I know he’d appreciate a visit.”

  Karena makes a face at herself in the mirror across from the bed and pulls her hair.

  “As soon as I can,” she promises. “Listen, Lois, I’ve got to run, but please, you’ll remember what I said about Charles?”

  But the Widow says brightly, “Well, bye now!” and hangs up.

  Karena takes the phone from her ear and looks at it, then tosses it aside on the bed. She stares at the TV. Well, Karena hasn’t expected much from the Widow, and her expectations have been met. If the woman weren’t so loathsome, Karena might feel sorry for her—maybe. The Widow had three husbands before Frank, the first purportedly beating her senseless night after night on their farm before suffering a fatal threshing accident. With each successive spouse the Widow has traded up financially and in community status, and she must have thought she’d struck gold with Frank Hallingdahl, Foss County’s most successful attorney. Those twins were a negative, especially that crazy son, Charles. A threat. An embarrassment. But the Widow would have known Charles hadn’t been heard from in years and Frank saw his daughter only for the occasional lunch. What the Widow could not have predicted was Frank’s stroke two years into their marriage—an especially bad joke, considering Frank was a jogger and health nut long before it became fashionable. Now the Widow is in limbo, caring for her shell of a husband, unable to marry again.

  Karena suddenly wants to see her dad so badly she can hardly stand it, not Frank as he is now but as he was when she and Charles were young—a skinny, tough little man gleefully rubbing his hands together and chortling over the facts of a particularly nasty lawsuit. Frank may have been an absentee dad, his motto being Justice Waits for No Man, but still, he’s the only one Karena’s got. Even more, though, Karena longs for her mom, Siri, with an intensity she hasn’t felt since the days following Siri’s death, when Karena felt she could spend the rest of her life wandering black-clothed through a desert, tearing her hair and howling, and it would still not express the dimension of her grief. If Siri were here, the two of them would drink white wine from the plastic bathroom cups, chilled with ice from the machine down the hall, and share a pack of Marlboros—although Karena quit years ago. They would laugh over the Widow’s bile and uselessness. They would analyze the Charles situation and bitch about it and make a plan together. Karena lies back and closes her eyes.

  5

  That night Karena wakes suddenly, as fully alert as if she had never gone to sleep at all. She turns to the bedside clock: yes, four thirty A.M. on the dot. Just like at home. This happens to her almost every night, every unresolved thing in her life babbling away in her head at once. It’s quite a party going on up there. An e-mail to a forgotten source. A response to a neglected wedding invitation. Heated arguments during which Karena says everything she wasn’t brave enough to say during the day—Why do you have to be so awful? she asks the Widow, I know your life’s been hard but I didn’t do anything to you. Can’t you help me? Then there are the usual suspects, such as, why is Karena alone in this motel room in the middle of the night? With no husband, no child? Thirty-eight years old and almost out of time, this is not how it was supposed to be. And, always, there is Charles. Charles, Charles, Charles, the fact of her absent twin like a radio signal that’s sometimes stronger, sometimes fainter, but one Karena never stops hearing.

  Tonight the signal is especially powerful because of her near miss. Find him. Find him. Find him. Karena gets up and goes into the bathroom for two aspirin and a dropper full of Bach Rescue Remedy, which is supposed to contain soothing flower essences but is, she’s pretty sure, about 90 percent brandy. Sometimes this helps. Tonight it doesn’t. Lying very still, Karena reminds herself she can’t do anything about any of these situations tonight. She’ll tend to them tomorrow. At five thirty, she turns on the light, throws back the sheet, and pads across the room to her laptop.

  She looks first to see if Tiff is online, since sometimes Tiff likes to have a virtual chat while nursing her youngest, Matthew. But Tiff is nowhere to be seen. Karena opens her e-mail next, but of course there’s nothing new since midnight when she last checked it because all the normal people are asleep. She dashes off the messages she was composing in her head, saving them in her draft file. Then she visits the weather websites, the Weather Channel and Storm Prediction Center and Wunderground, and finally Karena lands on Stormtrack.

  Stormtrack is the stormchasers’ forum, where the chasers have lively discussions of where severe weather will occur next and post accounts of chases they’ve just had. For a year Karena has been banned as a participant after one too many attempts to find Charles, the moderators letting her know in no uncertain terms that Stormtrack is for people looking for severe weather, not other people. But I’m Charles Hallingdahl’s sister, Karena wrote, and I’m trying to find him. I can’t reach him any other way. Won’t you please help me? The reply was a week in coming, and then it was a terse We have no way of verifying you are who you say you are, and our members’ privacy must be protected. Then, as an afterthought, Sorry. Good luck.

  Karena goes to the Forecasts & Nowcasts page, hoping against hope that Charles will have contributed something, but she knows it’s a long shot. It has been a dry summer for tornadoes, and there’s no severe weather predicted anywhere in the country until the following week, in the Dakotas, so the message boards are quiet. Karena scrolls through the old posts anyway, in case she has missed one by C_HALLINGDAHL, but there’s nothing. So she permits herself to do what she does on nights when missing Charles is particularly bad: She visits the Stormtrack archives. There are Charles’s storm photos from earlier this summer, proof he is still chasing, until yesterday the only evidence Karena had that her brother was alive.

  She clicks on each photo to enlarge it, although she has memorized them, their colors and composition, sometimes sees them floating on the backs of her eyelids as she tries to sleep.

  The herd of white horses fleeing an oncoming storm: rosebud county, montana, C_HALLINGDAHL.

  The Amish children gathered on a dirt road, their upturned faces fearful beneath their straw hats and bonnets, above them a triple fork of lightning: near sioux city, iowa, C_HALLINGDAHL.

  A ghostly tornado in a rain shaft,
backlit by lightning, white on gray: cimarron county, kansas, C_HALLINGDAHL.

  That’s it, for this year. And that’s all Charles ever writes, the captions beneath his photos.

  Karena looks at them until her head begins to ache, these images she would have guessed were her brother’s even if he hadn’t provided his name, because the wild and lonely and beautiful way the photographer frames the world is signature enough. She has tried so hard to find Charles. The private investigators she has hired—two of them, highly recommended, extremely expensive, and both useless—are just the tip of it. Karena has placed ads in all the Personals sections in every Tornado Alley newspaper, asking for information. She has done the same online. She has visited the weather websites, corresponded with a handful of stormchasers who say they have seen her brother here and there but he’s pretty much a lone wolf, likes to keep to himself, happy hunting. She has used the Ledger databases, search engines that churn up every documented fact of a person’s life, from birth to bankruptcy, felonies to divorces, weddings to addresses. Yet Karena has been unable to find anything on Charles. He has never owned property, never had an insured car, never paid taxes. He has lived entirely off the radar.

  Karena puts her face in her hands and rubs, making a little whimpering sound. She wishes to God she had retained her childhood ability to always know where Charles was, so that whenever some grown-up asked, Karena could say of her more adventurous twin, He’s under the porch or He’s up on the roof or He’s over by the water tower.

  “Where are you, Charles?” she says.

  The slice of window beneath the drapes is starting to glow gray. Karena clicks the refresh button to see if, by some miracle, C_HALLINGDAHL has posted something within the last ten minutes. The first part of the page to load is an advertisement, a brown tornado spinning across the top of Karena’s screen, leaving WHIRLWIND TOURS: THE ADVENTURE OF A LIFETIME! in its wake. The debris settles to reveal a white van, its hazards blinking as it watches the tornado dwindle, wreaking havoc in the distance.