Chapter four

When I opened my eyes, at first I stayed in my safety position. I could hear rain now, pelting the ground, only the ground seemed very close. It was still dark, still windy, but had already lightened up some since the tornado had passed.

At last, I forced myself to let go of my head and felt around for my cell phone. It was lodged between my backpack and my stomach and I pulled it out, my fingers white and shaky as I clung to it. I tried to call Mom.

No connection.

I tried Ronnie.

Same.

911.

Nothing.

I tried Jane. Dani. Everyone I could think of.

I was getting no bars. No cell service.

I lay there for a few more minutes, trying to catch my breath and quell my panicked sobbing. My arms and legs felt tingly from adrenaline and fear. I listened. I could hear talking and loud cries and car alarms bleating. A stuck police siren. A plea for help. And off in the distance, just maybe, the growling chug of the funnel cloud moving on.

Growing up, we were taught over and over again what steps to take in case of an approaching tornado. Listen for sirens, go to your basement or cellar, or a closet in the center of your house, duck and cover, wait it out. We had drills twice a year, every year, in school. We talked about it in class. We talked about it at home. The newscasters reminded us. We went to the basement. We practiced, practiced, practiced.

But we’d never—not once—discussed what to do after.

I think we never thought there would be an after like this one.

It seemed like forever before the rain and wind stopped. It was still gray around me, but the sky had lightened up enough that I could see fine without the flashlight, which I’d dropped in my scramble to the pool table.

Kolby. I would go get Kolby. See if he could call my mom from his phone. Slowly, I uncurled myself and, after a moment of hesitation, slid out from under the table and sat up.

At the opposite end of the basement, where Ronnie’s workbench normally sat, there was no ceiling. The floor I had been standing on while rummaging for a flashlight just fifteen minutes before was now buried in a dusty pile of rubble—what used to be our kitchen, except the table was gone and the walls were gone and the plates had all fallen out of their cabinets, which were also gone, and now lay in a heap on the concrete basement floor.

What was worse—I could see sky where the kitchen used to be. Wires and broken pipes jutted out here and there. Water gushed from somewhere.

“Oh my God, ” I said, pulling myself up to standing, unsure whether my wobbly legs would keep me that way. “Oh my God.”

I took a few steps toward the rubble. The closer I got, the more sky I could see. The kitchen walls, they were gone. Completely and totally gone.

I could have walked right up the rubble pile to the outside if I’d wanted to, but the sight of my broken kitchen was so foreign, the bare and jutting wires so frightening, I couldn’t make myself approach it. The basement stairs were still standing, and for some reason walking up them and through the basement door into the house seemed like the right thing to do, so I made my way over to them, a part of me hoping that maybe if I went up the stairs, the rest of the house wouldn’t be as bad as the kitchen looked.

The couch had been pulled to the rubble and turned up on its side. There were clothes strewn everywhere.

I glanced down at my hands, my fingers streaked with dried blood, my right hand wrapped around my useless cell phone. I stuffed the phone into my pocket and reached around to the back of my head again. It was sticky and my hair felt kind of matted, but it didn’t really hurt or anything, and it wasn’t gushing blood, so I ignored it, trying to keep things in perspective. It was just a cut. It could wait until Mom got home. Everything would be fine once she got here.

I crept forward, edging around things that didn’t belong there. A hunk of Venetian blinds. A DVD. A carpet of wet papers. A dog leash. A swing from Kolby’s little sister’s swing set, the ends of the chain twisted and broken, as if chewed up by a giant monster.

Slowly I crept up the stairs and pushed on the door, which would only open a little before it was stopped by something wedged against it. I tried leaning into the door and pushing harder, but it wouldn’t budge, so I sucked in my stomach and squeezed through the opening.

I stepped into the room, my dried-bloody hand flying up to my mouth. Had I not known I was standing in my living room, I never would have guessed this was my house. The roof was completely missing. The whole thing. No holes or tears—gone. Some of the outside walls were also missing, and the remaining walls were in perilously bad condition. One was leaning outward, the window blown and the frame hanging by a corner. Farther away, where the living room and the kitchen normally met, the house just… ended. I knew, from what I’d seen downstairs, that much of it had toppled in on itself. But I hadn’t been prepared for how gone it was. Even the stove was missing. Not moved, but completely absent. Nowhere in sight.

I couldn’t make it to my room. I couldn’t even really tell where my room was. And for a few minutes I stood dumbly in the basement doorway, my hand over my mouth, my eyes wide, my heart beating so fast I thought I might throw up, trying to take everything in. I’d seen photos of houses destroyed by tornadoes before, but never had I seen anything like it in real life. The destruction was complete, and terrible.

Outside. I needed to go outside and see if anyone else’s house had gotten hit. I needed to find help. To find Mom. To find someone who could take me to her, so I could break it to her how bad the house was damaged, and let her know I was okay.

I made my way to the front door, which was, oddly, still there, still on its hinges, though it was hanging on to a partial wall.

It took me several minutes of clawing at scraps of wood and climbing over debris to get to the door, treading carefully in my bare feet, wishing I’d been wearing shoes when the tornado hit, or at least had brought a pair down to the basement with me. I cut my hand on glass twice, more blood seeping out and mixing with the dried blood and grime already there. I wiped it on my jeans and kept going, trying to force down the frantic feeling welling inside me as I heard more crying and voices outside.

As I took a final step toward the door, my foot sank into something soft and cold. It was Marin’s purse, the one Mom had made her leave at home. I pulled it out of the rubble, then held it up and studied it. Other than being dirty and dusty and a little bit wet, it looked fine. I set it on top of a bent kitchen chair next to me for safekeeping—Marin would want her purse when she got back.

Finally, I wrenched the door open and immediately went breathless, as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me. I saw little lights dance before my eyes, and my lips felt tingly. For a shaky moment I thought I might pass out.

It hadn’t been just our house.

It had been everyone’s houses.

There was no street. Just piles upon piles of scraps and glass and broken furniture and wood and trash. I leaned back against the remaining wall of my house, but it groaned under my weight and I stood up again, quickly. I couldn’t get my breath.

I wanted my mom. Or Ronnie. Somebody to hold me up.

Several neighbors were standing in the street, in various poses of upset. Mr. Klingbeil stood with his hands on his hips, staring at what used to be his house and shaking his head. Mrs. Fay was locked in an embrace with Mrs. Chamberlain. They were both weeping loudly. Some of the little kids were crouching in the street, their faces looking curious and half-excited as they picked up branches and toys and bricks, but also very somber, like even they understood that this was bad, bad, bad. A couple of people were bent at the waist, mucking through the rubble of their houses, picking up little busted pieces of this and that and discarding them again.

I could see movement where our road normally connected with Church Street. A trickle of people were trudging along, looking shocked and lost. Off in the distance I could hear the wailing of sirens—emergency vehicles—but nothing nearby. How could they get to us, I wondered. There was no street to drive on. It was impossible to find it under all the rubble.

One man fell and a woman near him dropped to his side, pushing on his shoulder and yelling out, “Help! Anyone! Please! ” but the people kept walking around them, looking dazed and wounded. Finally, a man stopped and after a few minutes helped her get the fallen man to his feet. Together, they trudged along, the man between them, his arms slung around their necks.

“Holy shit, ” I heard. Kolby was pulling himself through his basement window, which appeared to be the only opening to the basement at all. Unlike my house, which still had that one wall standing, Kolby’s house had been completely razed to the ground. “Holy shit! ” And then he yelled it. “Holy shit! ” His little sister scrambled out the window behind him, silently taking in the scene as I’d done, her feet bare, her legs and feet smudged with dirt.

“You okay, Jersey? ” he shouted, and I could feel my head nodding, but I still wasn’t entirely sure I wasn’t going to pass out, so the movement felt very slow and fluid.

He turned and dropped to his knees, sticking his head back through the basement window, and then came out again, holding his mom under her arms and tugging her. She tumbled outside and sat where she landed, her hands going to her cheeks. “Oh, dear Lord, ” I heard her say, and then she began praying. “Thank you, Jesus, for keeping us alive. Thank you, dear Jesus, for saving us.”

Kolby started in my direction. “You should get away from that wall, ” he said, climbing across boards to get to me. He stepped on a baby rattle, cracking it. I stared at it, wondering where it might have come from and what had happened to the baby it belonged to. “Jersey? Hey, Jersey? You okay? ”

I nodded again, but the image of a baby flying through the air, caught in the eye of a monster tornado, was about all I could take, and I felt myself starting to go down.

“Whoa! Whoa! ” Kolby said, and he lunged up to the porch to grab my shoulders and keep me upright. “Any help over here? ” he called out.

“I’m okay, ” I mumbled. “I just need to sit down.”

“You’re bleeding, ” he said, maneuvering so he was next to me, his arm around both of my shoulders. He walked me off the porch and toward where our front yard used to be. Kolby and I had played more games of Wiffle ball on that front yard than I could count. Now that seemed like forever ago.

“I’m okay, ” I mumbled again, but when Kolby eased me toward a cinder block on the ground, I was glad to be sitting.

“You’re bleeding, ” he repeated. “Where are you hurt? ”

I reached up to the back of my head again. It seemed dry now. “An ashtray hit me, ” I said. “But I think it’s just a cut.”

I heard his mother calling out to someone else, asking if anyone was hurt. Kolby squatted in front of me so that his face was only inches from mine. “Where is everybody? ” he asked, and when I didn’t answer, he said, “Your mom and Ronnie? Marin? ”

I closed my eyes. It was easier to concentrate when I wasn’t looking at the wasted neighborhood. “Mom and Marin are at dance class. I don’t know where Ronnie is. I don’t know if he was on his way home from work or…” I trailed off, watched as Mr. Fay pointed out to Mrs. Fay a two-by-four that had been driven into the side of their house and was sticking out like a dart. Mrs. Fay snapped a photo of it with her phone. “The whole street is gone.”

He stood up and peered down toward Church Street, with its trickle of refugees heading away from the destruction.

“I know, ” he said. “It’s just… holy cow.”

“How far do you think it went? ” I asked.

He shook his head but didn’t answer.

“Kolby? How far do you think it went? ”

“I don’t know, ” he said, his voice sounding flat and croaky. “Looks like far.”

“Do you think…? ” I started, but I trailed off, afraid to finish my question, afraid that the answer would be no.

Do you think Mom will be able to get to me?