Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  I abandoned the sea of disorienting medical text on my computer and the sketchy websites that promised a cure in exchange for my credit card number, and spent the rest of the day feeling shaky and alone. The hours trickled by, and when Larry came home that evening, I approached him solemnly in the foyer and told him my news. “I think something’s wrong with my heart. Also, I may have had a panic attack.”

  Larry, being a thoughtful and steady man, and also a man who, unlike me, took his time when given information to which he was expected to respond, went about his usual habit of unloading his keys and wallet onto the front table, then walking into the kitchen to place the mail on the counter. We gave each other the standard hug and kiss, and then he asked, “What happened?”

  I told him about the palpitations and the paramedics, half watching him and half watching the trees outside hold the late light like honey while the sun rested like a slingshot in a low branch. Larry exhaled audibly, and for what seemed like a long time. His scrub top was coming untucked, and his hair had lost its gelled stiffness and flopped forward onto his forehead. It had been a long day for us both. “You’re fine,” he decided, smiling as if there were no other choice. And we stood like that, in the kitchen, with all that light between us.

  I couldn’t entirely blame him for dismissing me. We each had hypcochondriacal tendencies, which I found to be a source of both intrigue and familiarity when we were first getting to know each other. In fact, it was when we discovered that we’d both taken a semester off from college after diagnosing ourselves with MS that I fell in love with him. Since then, we’d both gone the neurotic route on occasion, thinking our headaches were tumors, our stomachaches cancer, our fevers malaria.

  But that night, everything seemed different, as if the earth had shifted by a degree so that nothing was quite as I’d left it. The small mosaic lamp on the bookshelf glowed cooler; I noticed creaks in the floorboards I hadn’t noticed before; and when I wasn’t looking, someone had altered all the angles of the trees in our yard. In bed, I threw my arm around Larry and blinked into the darkness. “I’m scared,” I said.

  Larry was silent again for a moment, and in that moment I wanted so many things—both reasonable and unreasonable things. I wanted him to ask me what I was afraid of, even if I didn’t have the answer. I wanted him to turn on the light and look at me, and maybe touch my face. I wanted him to tell me a story about a girl who was afraid and who found magical things in the woods. But it was late, and Larry was already overwhelmed by his new job in a new city, and being afraid is such a vague affliction that all he could do was tell me it was time to go to sleep. So I went to sleep.

  The next morning I woke up still terrified of being alone. “Do you have to go in today?” I asked, reaching for Larry’s hand in the predawn light. “Can’t you call in sick?”

  “You know I can’t,” he said, apologetically. So I watched him through the glass as he showered. He was sloppy with the shampoo, soaping his scalp as one might wash a black Lab. The suds ran down his face, his smooth chest. When he got out, I handed him his towel, then watched him drive his electric razor over his cheeks. I watched him spit toothpaste into the sink. I watched him pull on his boxers—the red ones with the gray whales—and his socks, and his scrubs. I watched his taillights disappear into the morning, and the night slink away like a lover behind him. I watched the daylight come on, steady as a train.

  I looked down at Aramis and Starlet. “Now what?” They looked back up at me, wide-eyed and silent.

  TWO

  If I could take one seed from childhood and propagate it, it would be what might seem like an ordinary couple of minutes outside a grocery store: I am eight, standing under an awning with my little sister, Joanne, who is five. Our mother has left us with the bags to go get the car. The world is slanted with rain, and our mother is disappearing into gray mist. Piped-in music reverberates against the clanging of metal carts, and fog spreads across the parking lot. It reaches under the awning and envelops us. I stare out into the spot where my mother vanished as if into an ocean, waiting for her to reappear. At first I don’t notice that Joanne, beside me, has her pointer finger pressing down on top of her bowl-cut head and her other hand at rest on her chubby hip as she pirouettes to the grocery store version of “Music Box Dancer.” She is pretending to be a ballerina. There my little sister spins and spins, for nobody but herself. There, she seems, for a minute or two, not to know the sounds of our mother’s screams or our father’s bellows; she seems not to know anything but a song, and the joy of moving to it.

  If I could show you only one picture of my sister, it would be of her in that moment, dancing in the mist in a juice-stained shirt in her favorite color, purple. I would choose that picture because it is an allegory of how the spirit wants to thrive and how, no matter the depth and weight of a particular kind of darkness, our spirits still seek light, still attempt to nurture the truest parts of ourselves. I would show it to you because it marks the last time I remember seeing my sister completely unfettered, happy.

  When it comes to everything that is tender and sacred about childhood, that moment is the purest one I’ve got. But it is also the most heartbreaking, because it represents a kind of loss in motion: as my sister twirled, even my eight-year-old self recognized her joy as a fragile thing, a thing that wouldn’t survive the cataclysmic world in which we lived. I could see then, unmistakably, what I had already lost, and what she would lose, too. A child myself, I ached for that moment as it happened. I wanted to keep it. But it was my sister’s moment—it was her seed, and it would not grow. If I could have, I would have cultivated it; I would have handed it back to her, a field of pale purple irises that smelled like candy.

  Later that same year, my mother took my sister and me shopping at a department store in a strip mall, and I made my mother angry by whining for something I wasn’t allowed to get. This escalated into a standoff, during which she walked through the store ignoring me while I pretended to vanish, following her from a safe distance while hiding behind racks of clothes so she couldn’t see me. I didn’t come to the register when she paid and left the store, and only after counting twenty Mississippis did I step outside to stand under the awning, my arms crossed in steely defiance. After loading the car, my mother pulled up and gave it to me—my one shot, her two words. “Get in.” But I wouldn’t budge. So my mother rolled the window back up, and I heard the click of the gears as she slowly began to drive away. I watched her turn past a row of cars and speed up. I saw my sister swiveled around, seat belt off, her fists balled, her red face stricken and furious behind the back window as she wailed and wailed and was silenced by the closed windows of the car and the growing distance between us. Then the awareness came—the night’s cool tip against my cheek, the ebb of my mother’s taillights, her car steadily approaching the parking lot exit—and I started running. I chased her car with every bit of strength my scrawny legs could muster, screaming for her to stop, but it was too late. She turned onto the main road and was gone.

  At first I cried the kind of cry that makes you stagger, that jars your mouth open. But then the crying mellowed to a soft whimpering, and I started counting the lamps in the parking lot, listening to the buzz of their yellow glow. I could hear traffic from the road hissing past. I could hear crickets waking up, their metallic chirp. And as I listened, the tears abated like a flash rain, and for a strange moment I felt peacefully untethered—free.

  That day became the first of what would be many days that my mother would leave me in parking lots. It became a routine, each of us playing our part—my threatening to leave, and her letting me go. But in the end, she always came back for me. After ten or twenty minutes, I’d recognize our Grand Prix as it turned in off the road, and my heart would spring, and I’d watch her headlights come toward me, and the car would stop, and my sister would be looking at me through the glass, and my mother would open the door, and this time I’d get in, and none of us would say
anything, but the music would be playing, and my sister would reach for me, and I would take her hand, and we would head down the road in the direction of home.

  THREE

  Solitude had always been the place where I went to be with my secrets, where I felt them thriving and banging in my blood, where I felt as alive as I could feel. But after that first panic attack, solitude had transformed overnight into a fate almost unbearable, and I wanted nothing to do with it. For a long time, I stood by the window and watched the driveway, the empty space Larry had left behind when he went to work. Unlike my usual strong, levelheaded self, I felt like a child abandoned again, and I had to keep resisting the urge to call and beg him to come back.

  All I could think about was what would happen if another attack came. And then, probably because I was worrying about it, one did come, this time while I was peering noncommittally into the refrigerator.

  Once again, my speeding heart offered no reasons for its alarm. My body trembled and my breath came short and my heart rattled against my rib cage. My sense of space warped so that with each step, as I clutched the phone and hustled outside, I thought I was falling. I tried to focus on something, but everything around me had gone fuzzy—the slate stones of the walkway, the azalea bushes primly in their row, the Caribbean blue flowerpot with its sun-crackled paint. There was only pounding, pounding, and the inescapable feeling I was going to die.

  This wasn’t a quiet feeling; it was a loud and jagged scream; it was the terror of drowning; it was all the terrible things I had ever known and ever feared, uncoiling into a thousand savage arms ruggedly pulling me under until I could not see or think or feel beyond my most basic hardwired need to claw through and take another breath.

  I called 911, but when I heard the voice on the other end, I remembered the men who’d been here just the day before, how they’d smiled at me, and I couldn’t bear the thought of facing them again. With my fingertips pressed against the side of my neck, I told the 911 operator that I’d misdialed, then hung up and hunched over on the front step, my head in my lap.

  When I called Larry, I spoke into my knees. “It’s happening again.”

  “What’s happening again? I’m in the middle of seeing patients.”

  “My heart,” I said. “Can you come home?”

  “You’re okay,” he said. Then he repeated himself, as if there were no other thing to say.

  But those words didn’t help, no matter how many times he repeated them. They were both a dismissal and a directive, and I wanted neither. I wanted him to make some gesture that would magically gather me up, like a basket of fallen fruit. The phone shook in my hand, rattled against my ear. “You can’t come home, can you?”

  Larry sighed. “I’ll be home as soon as I can.” We both knew what that meant: not soon at all.

  Outside, it was obnoxiously summer, things blooming all over the place. And my fear seemed to be part of the pollen, stuck in the air, collecting in my lungs. I thought of friends I could call, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to say some version of Hi, I thought I’d give you a call between panic attacks or heart arrhythmias or whatever the hell is happening to me, just to let you know that I’m afraid—of everything. Also, I may be going crazy.

  I couldn’t understand how I would be so afraid now, here. As a child in my parents’ custody and as a teenage runaway, I’d had countless reasons to be afraid, but when I was nineteen, I’d walked away from that world and given myself a fresh start. For the sixteen years that followed, I’d found what seemed to me a stable and happy life. I’d once come across a saying attributed to the Buddha—“How sweetly the lotus grows in the litter of the wayside”—and I liked imagining myself as that lotus, having emerged from the filth of my past still clean. It was nice to think that the chaos I’d lived through not only hadn’t damaged me but had provided me with a hard-won wisdom I could offer my friends. I was happy to be the one they came to with their love spats, their sadness, their uncertainty. That was my role with most people in my life—a calm presence who could show others how to move toward light—and I took it on gratefully. I wanted to believe that I had already learned the hard lessons of life, that the majority of my struggles—real struggles—were behind me now. And I liked the idea that by taking charge of my life at such a young age, by having pulled myself up out of the abyss by the force of my own will, I’d discovered a power I probably would never have otherwise known I had, a power that made it possible for me to be relentless about going after what I wanted—love, safety, a happy life—and to build it. But now, as I sat in terror, for the second time in as many days, on the front step of the beautiful home I shared with the beautiful man I loved, I felt utterly powerless.

  When Larry came home that night, I greeted him with his old stethoscope from medical school, which I’d found in the basement in the equally old black doctor’s bag that he’d purchased earnestly for his first day as a doctor-to-be and never carried again after he realized that the only doctors who had them were in 1950s movies. He looked crumpled—not only his scrubs but also his expression—and I could see the toll this intensely stressful new job was taking on him. Normally, I would have pulled him toward me and tried to make him smile, but instead, in my obsession, I thrust his stethoscope at him. “My heart,” I said. “Something’s wrong with it.” As far as I was concerned, my diagnosis wasn’t a matter of choosing between panic attacks and heart problems; it was both.

  He placed an armful of papers down on the foyer table and listened to my heart. “It’s bad,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Shhhh.”

  “It’s an arrhythmia.”

  “It’s not an arrhythmia.”

  “Then it’s a murmur.”

  “Shhhh,” he said, tracing the stethoscope around under my shirt. “It sounds fine.” He pulled the stethoscope out of his ears and placed it on top of the table.

  I picked it up and gave my heart a listen. It was fast. “I don’t know,” I said. “How much did you study hearts in medical school?”

  “Not that much.”

  “Then how do you know it’s normal?”

  “Because I know.”

  “That’s not very convincing.” I took the stethoscope back. “Maybe I should see a cardiologist.”

  “I’m telling you,” he said, his voice rising in exasperation, “your heart is fine.” He stood silently looking at me with that wide-eyed defiant stare he gave when he had nothing more to say.

  I knew what he was thinking—that this was nothing more than the worries of a hypochondriac—and I understood why he would see it that way. Maybe if I’d told him that my heart had felt out of control since I was eleven, he would have invited me to come sit with him, and we could have talked about it. But my past frightened Larry, and sometimes it frightened me to tell him about it. He knew a basic sketch of my childhood, my years of homelessness, but the details stayed tucked away. It was complicated, what to tell and what not to tell. Part of what I loved so much about Larry was his wholesomeness—his persistent boyishness (even as a chairman in his early forties, he was regularly mistaken for a student) and general lack of worldly experience—and how everything about him stood as an antidote to the darkness of the life I’d once known. In omitting the grit of my childhood, it was as if I were claiming some of Larry’s innocence as my own, as if together we could create a different story.

  And we did. We’d filled our first house, a small old Cape Cod, with dancing, with the scents of fresh flowers and roasting vegetables and sweet things baking, with pictures of us smiling the smiles of people in love. We held hands always—whether we were in the car, bobbing our heads to corny disco songs, or lying in bed, having random discussions about the interconnectedness of particles—even in the rare moments when we were arguing. Sometimes when Larry got called in to do trauma surgery in the middle of the night, I went with him. When I taught writing classes in the evening, he waited
outside the door of my classroom just to carry my books the hundred feet to my car. We spent hours past midnight standing in our backyard and watching the sky through Larry’s telescope, then talked into the morning about the universe, old dreams, what our children might look like. There’s an old question meant to test your love: would you fight a bear to save this person? And with Larry, I never had any doubts. I would have braved any bear for him, and he would have done the same for me. And for a while in the beginning, as we were creating our new story, I forgot about my own. I let myself believe that ours was the only one.

  But palimpsests are problematic. No matter how many stories you put on top of the first story, the first one is always there, visible. And more than innocence, I wanted intimacy, which is difficult when you give your partner only sketches of yourself, when the person who loves you doesn’t want to know more. It’s not that Larry didn’t know me—he knew my character, my quirks, my joys; he knew who I’d become—but not who I’d been. And I wanted him to want to know the rest. Because what was going on inside me, most of the time, was more than what Larry was willing to see. Peeling the layers back and back, underneath it all I would always be, foremost, a runaway—a girl ruled by the tempestuousness of her heart. It would be the story that would tell itself again and again, no matter how I tried to silence it.

  We didn’t talk about hearts anymore that night. Instead, we ate dinner in front of the television, my hand incessantly darting to the pulse at my neck—as if by monitoring it I could somehow control it; I could be truly certain I was alive—while Larry pretended not to notice. Eventually I picked the stethoscope back up, pressed the circle to my chest, and listened to my heart. It sounded like a washing machine that gets unbalanced in the spin cycle, knocking urgently, louder and louder. I don’t remember what we watched on television, only that it was narrated by the sound of my heartbeat.