Chapter five

The next few hours went by in a blur. Some of the men were going house to house, cocking their heads and listening for cries for help under the rubble. Every time they heard even the tiniest noise—the mew of a cat or the wooden click of a board settling or anything that might have sounded like a whimper—they fell on it, down on their knees, ripping things apart with their hands, their faces dripping with sweat and determination. A yell went up every time a hole to a basement was found, an expectant and grateful face peering up out of it.

And then they found Mrs. Dempsey.

Too fragile to make it to her basement, the old lady had cowered in her bathtub to ride out the storm. She’d even brought some pillows in with her. They found her there, pillows still surrounding her but a central air unit crushing the top half of her body.

They pulled the air conditioner off her, and Mrs. Fay found a shower curtain and they draped it over Mrs. Dempsey’s body.

After that, the mood got very somber and people started wondering aloud when the emergency vehicles were going to come help us. We could still hear them braying and warbling in the distance, but the sounds weren’t getting any closer. We thought we even heard the staccato bark of someone talking through a PA system or megaphone, but none of us could make out the words. It was all very muffled and so very far away. Why were they so far away?

The rescue efforts got slower. People started saying they were thirsty, or tired, and spent more time sitting or picking through their own things halfheartedly. I had no doubt that after all that digging, the men were thirsty, but I had a theory that the new focus on preventing dehydration was a way of not admitting that they were really afraid of finding another dead body—only the next time it might be a toddler or a teenager or someone they’d had lunch with just last week.

I stayed on my cinder block, watching them. Every so often I would try my cell phone again. Wait for it to ring, which it never did. Peer down the street for Mom’s car, which never turned the corner. Kolby’s shadow fell over me.

“We’re going for a walk. You wanna come? ” he asked, touching me lightly on the shoulder.

I shook my head, not looking up.

He waited a moment. “You sure? We want to see how bad the damage is, and see where everybody’s going.”

I saw his shadow gesture toward Church Street, but again I shook my head.

“Will you be okay by yourself? ” he asked, shuffling the toe of his shoe awkwardly against the cinder block I sat on. “I can stay.”

“No, ” I said. “Go ahead. I’m fine. It’s just if I’m not here when Mom gets back, she’s gonna freak out.” But even I wasn’t sure how honest that statement was. Part of me knew I was staying because I was afraid to see how far the damage went. I didn’t want to know why a steady stream of people continued to trickle down Church Street.

After he left, I tried not to let my mind wander, tried not to think about the small things I’d lost in the tornado, especially not with Mrs. Dempsey covered by a shower curtain a couple houses down, but I couldn’t help myself. My clothes, my earrings, my music. Granted, I didn’t have trendy clothes or expensive earrings, but if it had all blown away… I had nothing. Even a few cheap somethings is better than nothing.

How much of Mom’s stuff was gone? How much of all of our stuff was gone? And how long would it be before we got it back?

I looked down at my feet and noticed that one was resting on a photo. I picked it up, pulled it out of the grime, and studied it. I wondered where our photos had gone, if our past would end up under a stranger’s foot, would be tossed in the garbage.

The thought left me cold. It seemed impossible to still have a past if your memories were resting beneath blackened banana peels in a landfill.

I stared at that photo for a long, long time. A family, dressed in matching T-shirts and jeans, stood by a tree. The little boy up front mugged for the camera. He was smiling so hard around gaps of missing teeth, his eyes were pushed shut. His mom’s hands were on his shoulders protectively. An older sister with long, straight hair smiled sweetly with her dad’s arm around her waist. A whole, happy family. I wondered if the tornado had hit them, too. If it had done to their house what it had done to ours. I wondered where their street was. Where that tree was.

A jolt went through me and I stood up. The trees.

For the first time, I noticed that they were gone. Not just a few broken or blown over here or there, which happened pretty regularly during spring storms in Elizabeth. They were gone. Big holes where some had been. Snapped-off trunks. Stripped branches. Our once-tree-lined street had been robbed of all things green. I turned in circles, craning my neck to see around and above the mounds of boards and broken houses. I couldn’t see any trees.

I dropped the photo back onto the mountain of junk and plopped down again.

The afternoon stretched on, and then evening began to set in. My stomach started to twist with hunger and I idly thought about the hamburger I’d left in the pan on the stove when the storm hit. I wondered what we’d do for dinner, and the thought prompted me to try my cell phone again. Still no service. Still no Mom.

Kolby and his mom and sister came back, their figures shadowy under the graying sky of evening combined with what looked like another approaching thunderstorm. Slowly, people who’d stayed behind crawled out of the rubble to greet them, dropping whatever bricks or boards or old appliances they were holding, curiosity winning out on their faces. I got up and walked toward them, too.

“Gone, ” Kolby was saying when I reached them. He was out of breath, his eyes bright and cheeks gritty. “Gone, ” he repeated. He shook his head. His sister clutched the hem of her mom’s shirt.

“We walked at least a mile, ” his mom said, her voice loud and take-charge. The emergency sirens had finally stopped, leaving us in a blanket of confused silence. “Everywhere it looks like this. And there’s people…” She paused, her jowls trembling. “Dear Jesus, please be with those people, ” she whispered.

“Are the ambulances…? ” Mrs. Fay asked, but tapered off when Kolby shook his head.

“No way they can get to us. The streets are covered. Like this one. The houses are gone. And it looks like it goes on forever. I can’t even see Bending Oaks. It’s gone, too. A whole school.”

Bending Oaks was the junior high Kolby and I went to. It was a good three miles away, but it sat atop a hill, so it was visible from almost anywhere in Elizabeth. I had a hard time wrapping my head around what the hill would look like without the big building silhouetted in the sun.

When I tuned in again, Kolby was saying, “… a two-by-four through his leg. He was trying to drag himself out of his house, and his neighbor found a wheelbarrow. But they said the hospital’s been hit, too, so nobody knows where to go. Nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”

I thought back to all the people I’d seen walking along Church Street. About the man who had collapsed. They’d been trying to make their way to help, but what if there was no help? How far would they have to go before they found it?

“Dear Jesus, please be with us in our time of sorrow and need…” Kolby’s mother had begun again, her eyes shut tight, her palms facing upward. Kolby glanced at her, seemed to consider saying more, but thought better of it and hung his head. A couple people gathered around his mom and muttered “Amen” every so often, listening as her prayer tumbled through our devastated portion of the street.

The hospital was at least five miles in the opposite direction. If it had been hit, and Bending Oaks had been hit, that meant this tornado had reached in and swept away a huge chunk of Elizabeth.

It also meant that Marin’s dance studio had been right in the tornado’s path.

Nobody knew what to do. We stood gathered around Kolby and his mom and sister for a long time, and more neighbors joined us, one by one.

Someone’s son had been sucked right out of his bedroom while he rummaged for a weather radio. Someone hadn’t heard from her husband, who was driving home from work. Someone wondered if his wife, a nurse working a rotation in the PICU, was okay. Someone had heard pounding and yells coming from beneath a car and was sure there were still neighbors trapped inside their homes. And speaking of homes… nobody had one anymore. Where would we go? What would we do? That became our mantra: What are we going to do?

Then the sky opened up and raindrops tumbled onto our arms and our cheeks and pattered against the boards we stood on, releasing an earthy smell. And we had no trees to huddle under. We had no umbrellas. Our only shower curtain was covering poor Mrs. Dempsey. So we stood in the rain, squinting against it, our shoulders hunched, for as long as we could, adding to our mantra: It’s raining now, and we have nowhere to go, what are we going to do?

A couple of the men were able to wrench open a car door, and a few people climbed inside. The windows fogged and it was like they were gone. Saved.

And then the wind picked up and began to drive the rain sideways into our ears, and our hair began to drip, and it felt good, but it also felt cold, and we couldn’t help wondering what was next for us, especially after Kolby’s mom began praying, “Dear God, please let there not be another tornado on the way, ” and it wasn’t clear if she was actually praying for this or just stating the same fear that had begun to trickle into all of our minds.

Some of the neighbors worked together to prop a piece of wallboard up against the side of what was left of their house, and they huddled under it, their clothes soggy, their feet sinking into the now-saturated debris. Tears began to flow along with the rain as the reality of what had happened to us truly began to sink in.

Kolby’s mom and sister joined them, and soon it was Kolby and me standing in the street alone, blinking at each other through raindrops clinging to our eyelashes.

“There was this guy, ” he said, now that it was just the two of us. He blinked off into the distance, took a breath, and turned his gaze back to me. “It was like… like he’d been hit by a bomb. He was in half, Jersey. I didn’t even see where his legs had gone. I think they were buried.”

“Oh my God. What about Tracy? ”

“She didn’t see it. Mom kept walking with her. But I can’t stop seeing it, you know? I don’t think I ever will.”

I touched his shoulder lightly, then, embarrassed, pulled my hand away.

“I puked, ” he said. “And I feel like such a pussy for puking. It’s…” He shook his head. “Forget it.”

The rain drove into us. I didn’t know what to say to him about the half-man or about his puking. I didn’t know what he wanted from me. Our relationship had always been about playing pickup games of baseball or tag or building forts and riding bikes. We didn’t talk about puking, or crying, or being scared.

And I was. I was so, so scared.

“I’m going inside, ” I said, like I’d said to him a million times before. Like I was tired of playing hide-and-seek or wanted to watch TV or eat dinner or something else totally ordinary.

“Inside where? ”

I gestured to what was left of my house. “Basement. In case…” In case of another tornado. “In case my mom comes home.”

He shook his head. “You shouldn’t go back in there. It’s not stable. Look how it’s leaning. And the ceiling’s been ripped out.”

“It’ll be okay. It’s better on the inside.” Which was a total lie, but the more the thunder roared above us, the more Kolby’s haunted eyes transferred that image of the half-man into my soul, the more his mom prayed into the wind, the more frightened I became. Please, God, don’t make me have to go through another tornado. Not again. Not alone.

My heart started pounding and I started breathing heavy and I knew I needed to get back into the basement, back to where I’d been safe, right away. “I’ll come out when the rain stops.”

Kolby grabbed my arm and I gently pulled away from him. I smiled. Or at least tried to. It felt like a smile, anyway.

“I’ll be fine, Kolby. You should be with your mom and Tracy right now.”

A bolt of lightning crashed and we both jumped.

“You want me to go with you? ” he asked, though I could tell by the way he stared anxiously at the house that he wanted the answer to be no. I could tell he felt torn between protecting me and protecting his mom and sister.

I didn’t want him there. Kolby was a great friend, and a part of me wanted to latch on to him and hope he could keep me safe. But for some reason, the devastation behind that leaning half-wall of my house felt too personal, too embarrassing. It was my family’s life, all bunched up and bundled and twisted into heaps, and I didn’t want him to see it, even though I knew that most of our stuff was probably lying on the street right now, getting turned into mush by the rain, and that most of his stuff was, too.

“It’s okay. I’ll be fine, ” I said. “When my mom comes, tell her I’m inside, okay? ”

“Okay, ” he said reluctantly. “But if you need anything…” He trailed off, probably thinking exactly what I was thinking, which was What? If I need anything, what? What can you do? You lost everything, too.

I nodded and turned back toward my house on shaking legs.

There was more thunder, and my heart pounded as I climbed the steps and slipped in through the front door.

My brain expected to find the scene on the other side of the door exactly like it had always been. Brown carpet, vacuum lines still scratched through it from Monday’s chores. The TV on. The wall of mirrors behind the dining room table—a throwback from when the house was built in the 1970s—reflecting our mismatched garage-sale table and chairs. The white linoleum with the pale blue flowers stretching into the kitchen, the light of the dishwasher blinking to indicate that the dishes inside were clean. The hum of the refrigerator and the air conditioner.

Instead, it was raining. Inside my house. The wet plaster of the fallen walls smelled chalky. The only sound was the rumbling of the sky.

I tried to make out something familiar. And finally I did. The television stand was missing. But the television sat there in its place, as if someone had picked up the TV and taken the stand, then set the TV back down. Of course, what use was a TV when there was no outlet to plug it into?

Marin’s purse was still on the chair where I’d left it. I opened it and looked inside, leaning my head over it to try to keep the relentless rain out.

It was filled with three packs of gum and a tube of iridescent pink lipstick that Mom had handed down to her. Marin’s treasures.

I looped the purse over my arm and headed along the path I’d cleared earlier, trying hard not to step on anything sharp or dangerous, picking my feet up high with each step and placing them down carefully. There was so much broken glass.

When I finally made it to the bottom step, I was out of the rain’s reach, so I stood there and stared, squeezing water out of my hair and wiping my cheeks dry with my hands, trying to figure out what to do next.

Trying to figure out how I would survive until Mom and Ronnie came home.