Weather Woman

by Cai Emmons

  Later, on that same trip, Bronwyn saw her first lenticular cloud. The sun was setting over the mountains when the cloud appeared, an indigo lozenge with a spindle of lighter blue beneath. This was the kind of cloud frequently and famously mistaken for a UFO, and it was not hard to see why. The symmetry of its design was what struck Bronwyn, a symmetry commonly associated with manmade objects. Certainly nature, too, produces abundant symmetry—honeycombs, peacock tails, spider webs, crystals—but not usually in the form of clouds. She and Diane gazed up without speaking, then looked at each other and shook their heads in wonder.

  Twenty minutes shy of landing, the flight becomes more turbulent. The plane dips and rises suddenly. Outside the clouds, hematite-gray, speed in the opposite direction like full-sailed pirate galleons. Doris, Bronwyn’s seatmate, seizes Bronwyn’s hand, clutching it to her belly like a valuable purse. She looks out with such panicky eyes that Bronwyn doesn’t have the heart to withdraw her hand.

  A thin wire of lightning draws Bronwyn’s gaze back to the window. This storm system wasn’t supposed to come in for another twenty-four hours or more. The runway is slick. The plane shimmies and skids. Doris emits a rodent-like squeal. After assisting Doris in getting organized, Bronwyn, unmoored, wends her way up the jetway and through the Wichita airport, eyes wedded to the banks of floor-to-ceiling windows that showcase the tenebrous sky, quietly at work building clouds. How can so many around her be so nonchalant? Isn’t the probability of death as great here as it is in certain war zones? Is it possible to become inured? Will her newly sensitized skin function the same way in this unfamiliar landscape?

  Because she was unable to find a convenient flight to Oklahoma City, she chose Wichita instead, and now she must drive 160 miles south. Her rental car, a late-model Ford SUV, is far too big for her needs, but it does make her feel safely armored. The landscape on either side of the road is a lesson in geometry, with its squared-off fields, its round hay bales, its ruler-straight roads. Evidence of devastation appears unexpectedly, road signs crashed and crumpled, uprooted trees with tumorous root balls exposed, barns sheared to half their height. In one place, just past a town named Hope, she spots a mound of sheetrock and shingles, pipes and wires, a pink toilet turned on its side as if napping.

  The mid-level altocumulus clouds are a metallic blue, with defining crenellated castellanus tops, announcing unsettled weather ahead. The sun glows through them, turning the yellow fields beneath them gold. It’s Dorothy’s Kansas, before the tornado arrived to sweep her off to Oz. Bronwyn scans the horizon for a wall cloud, a tornado’s precursor, but so far she sees nothing.

  At a rest stop she pulls over, gets out, sniffs the air. The pavement is dark with recent rain and humidity clings to her face and arms with the tenacity of burrs. Beyond the restroom, fields stretch clear to the horizon. The sky here is huge, full of bravado, gulping everything and dwarfing the land below. A bout of loneliness engulfs her. Blood whirs in her cheeks and neck. Is she imagining it, or is that really thunder growling in the distance? She doesn’t trust any of the reports she’s read from the National Weather Service, but Vince will set her straight.

  Movement in the middle distance snags her attention. A prairie dog? Having never seen one, she can’t be sure. But she has read about prairie dogs. They have a sophisticated system of vocal communication, and one member of the colony will sometimes sacrifice his life to warn the other group members of danger. An altruistic suicide.

  Oklahoma City rises suddenly from the flat plain, its skyscrapers glinting in the setting sun, almost blinding. The word skyscraper has always amused her. Buildings rarely reach as high as most clouds, so naming them skyscrapers is certainly hyperbole—yet humans love to think of their achievements in grandiose terms.

  The Holiday Inn is as she expected, generic and reasonably comfortable. She doesn’t, however, have high hopes for sleeping, despite her exhaustion. She’s too nervous about tomorrow’s late morning meeting with Vince. She should have talked to him on the phone rather than making all the arrangements through email. She would have liked to hear the timbre of his conversational voice before interacting face-to-face. It’s too late now. She turns the TV to Vince’s station and gets into bed at 8:00 p.m., reading a magazine to kill time until Vince comes on at 10:00.

  She has the feeling she’s seeing him for the first time, or seeing things about him she’s never noticed before. His eyes are slightly asymmetrical, a soft gray, and they seem to follow her every movement. His report matches that of the National Weather Service—a storm front will be coming through in forty-eight hours. He appears exhausted and is hopping around less than usual, perhaps saving himself for the upcoming crisis. Still, he speaks with gravitas, as if standing in a pulpit with the dominion of an entire religion behind him. Who wouldn’t be ready to follow such an impressive man? Reassured, she switches off the TV before he’s done.

  17

  Matt has never been much of a sunbather, but he accompanies his parents, Ivan and Marie, to the beach, ferrying their folding chairs, and the umbrella and picnic basket, and the bag with towels and water shoes, to the place in the sand they deem suitable. They’re in their early seventies and reasonably fit, but they appreciate the help. Sometimes when Matt is around they act a little more helpless than they really are, and he realizes they’re all preparing for that unpredictable moment when parents cease to become the caregivers and become the cared-for.

  Ivan was a plumber all his working life, and he can still wriggle into small dark spaces to diagnose a plumbing problem even if his hands are too arthritic to fix what’s wrong. Marie, too, is still strong, but she’s put on weight and doesn’t move as quickly as she once did. They relax into the low beach chairs, sighing with satisfaction. Matt is touched by them, by the brambly gray hairs that fur Ivan’s chest, by his mother’s columnar, age-spotted shanks. They don’t care how they look—they have too much to be proud of.

  It’s a popular public beach, crowded all summer, especially on hot days like this. They sit in their chairs, feet immersed in the hot sand, silent for the moment, drugged by the heat and the sun ball and the murmuring Atlantic. There is a serenity about the day, an illusion of permanence. It seems as if there will always be this brilliant sun, this hot sand, this whispering water. There will always be these human beings taking pleasure at the shore. Matt feels frozen in time even as he sees the illusion of it, the invisible racing of other turbulent forces beneath the repose.

  “I never dare ask,” Ivan says, “what crazy thing you got going.”

  “Can we not use the word crazy?” Matt says.

  “Don’t kid yourself, son. I read your paper now and then. Bunk, all of it. You went to college for this?”

  “If there were another job out there, I’d take it, believe me. It’s hard these days.”

  “Don’t bother him about it,” Marie says, fingers grazing Ivan’s forearm. “He’ll find something else soon. Won’t you, honey?”

  “Sure, Mom. I’m working on it.”

  It’s the ritual conversation. It doesn’t bother Matt, not any more. Ivan gets his digs in and moves on without belaboring the point. He has other children to brag about—he can afford to leave Matt alone. Matt and Ivan have an understanding, a bond that doesn’t depend on how either one of them functions in the world. They are similar in certain ways; both brazen but gentle, they see themselves mirrored in the other. Matt is quite sure he’ll be the one to preside over his father’s passing when the times comes. Not that anyone talks about this, but Matt knows.

  He lies in the hot sand without a towel, closes his eyes, and buries his toes. His job has bothered him before, but never as much as it bothers him now. How humiliating it was to see how Bronwyn responded to hearing about it, her face cruising from dismay, to disappointment, to disgust. How does one come back from a starting point of such humiliation? The thing is, she’s right, writing about her is a reprehensible thing to do. The need for money is no excuse.

  When Matt t
old his boss Josh there was no story, Josh balked. “Hey, man, can’t you make something up?” But long ago when Matt was hired, he made it clear to Josh he wouldn’t make things up. He certainly isn’t going to start now. How depressing to realize that so many people assume that’s what he does routinely. What other work could he do? His father would be more than happy to teach him plumbing, but Matt is sure he wouldn’t be happy meddling with clogged drains and overflowing toilets. The world of work seems to offer so few good choices for a humanities guy like him, a lover of people, a lover of travel, a man wedded to his own curiosity, too interested in everything to allow him to stay focused for long.

  More pressing than the work dilemma is the meteorologist herself. Bronwyn. Bronwyn Artair. He thinks he might be smitten. No, he is smitten. He’s had plenty of girlfriends over the years. There were three in high school, maybe four depending on how you count them, and in the ten years since he graduated from high school there have been more girlfriends than he can count on two hands. The longest relationship lasted just over a year—a girl named Darcy who became anorexic after they split up—but more usual has been four to six months. He slides into relationships with relative ease, but he has a tendency to get bored just as easily. He goes berserk being hemmed in, and many of his girlfriends got clingy, which made him want to flee immediately. He doesn’t think of himself as a Lothario—when he’s in a relationship he’s very present and attentive and entirely monogamous—but he hasn’t conquered the longevity issue and he can’t begin to imagine Til death do you part.

  He has always told himself someday. What if this is that day? Of course you can’t tell at the outset, during the infatuation period, but when he thinks back to how he felt on meeting girls in the past, this feels different. He’s never felt so urgent, so clear that time must not be wasted. For so long he felt he had years and years before he’d have to settle down and begin to build a life with a mate. But now he seems to have careened into adulthood. Is it only because she’s so resistant to him? He doesn’t think so. He thinks of the moment when they sat drinking coffee by the river. The world bustled around them—birds swooping overhead, rabbits hopping by, the river on its merry unstoppable way to the sea—but they sat in a nimbus of hush and stillness. It was dream-like, almost sacred. He is not usually so appreciative of the natural world; he tends not to notice it; he couldn’t tell anyone a single thing about the flora and fauna of Florida. Yeah, flamingos, sure.

  He doubts she wants anything more to do with him now. If he wants to see her again he’ll have to work at it. He’s sought out girls before, but he’s never had to chase them. The thought of actually chasing someone is a little frightening, to be honest, but he can’t simply let her go. He’s been horribly restless since he left her, stuck in the clutch of longing’s penumbra.

  He is suddenly aware that his parents are no longer beside him. He lifts his head and sees their square, lumpish bodies wading into the water, hand-in-hand, his mother squealing a little as each small wave rides higher up her legs. They’ve been lucky with each other, he thinks. His siblings have been lucky with their mates too. He hopes such luck will be his.

  A cluster of girls—early twenties, young women really—are hanging out around the lifeguard station, swatting each other with towels and laughing. They’re all wearing skimpy bikinis—parts of breasts and fannies hanging out as if they’re in Rio—and trying to grab and hold the attention of the poker-faced lifeguard with the six-pack and the absurd tan and the too-cool shades. The lifeguard is the guy Matt, for a brief period in high school, wanted to be. He’s glad he’s done with that phase of his life. Not so long ago those girls would have prompted him to rise and saunter over for a chat. But today they hold no draw for him; they only remind him of Bronwyn’s incandescence.

  18

  Vince Carmichael’s TV station is far bigger and splashier than Bronwyn’s New Hampshire station. The receptionist’s desk is fit for a CEO, and the receptionist herself, blonde hair slashing eye and cheek just so, wears a tight white dress that reveals more cleavage than seems appropriate in a place of business. Bronwyn feels prim in her black skirt and black cotton sweater; she ought to have worn something flashier, but she thought flashy might cast doubt on her credibility.

  The Weather Center is busy as a Hollywood set and infused with, if not a sense of alarm, at least a sense of focused attention and high purpose. Vince, his back to Bronwyn, sits at the center of a semicircle of screens displaying maps, radar, Doppler, reports on the weather all over the country, into Canada and Mexico and across the Pacific. His minions work at stations in an outer ring, some on the phone, some gazing so fixedly at their screens they appear catatonic. Raised monitors throughout the room play a daytime drama currently being broadcast from another part of the station. To one side of all this activity is a stage from which Vince delivers his reports.

  The receptionist instructs Bronwyn to wait on the periphery and approaches Vince, leaning down to whisper in his ear. He nods. “He’ll be with you shortly,” the receptionist tells Bronwyn before gliding off.

  Ground zero, the center of all things. The din makes it hard to focus. People whiz by. On the daytime drama a woman sobs. A guy on the phone is ordering lunch. “No mustard, I said. No mustard!” On the far side of the room, someone yells. “Typhoon in the South China Sea!”

  She waits, watching Vince. After several minutes he turns to assess her, squinting a little and making a single culvert of his two exhausted eyes. Bronwyn smiles. A man on the daytime drama gasps, he’s just been shot. Vince turns away, raising a single finger in her direction. “Fire in Yosemite!” someone shouts.

  After another ten minutes, Vince rises, cardboard coffee cup in hand, and walks past her, nodding. Assuming this is her cue, she follows. Down a hallway they march, into a large brown office, walls covered with framed photographs of tornado-damaged landscapes, photos of supercells taken from space, award certificates, citations of excellence. Man cave. Brag chamber.

  Vince sits behind his desk into a chair that dwarfs him. He leans back, regarding her with curiosity. She stands still, letting herself be scrutinized while scrutinizing him back, trying to match the intensity of his gaze, her spine lifting and straightening with purpose. He is so much smaller and craggier in person, his face textured as a dry riverbed.

  “Well—?” he says.

  “I’m Bronwyn,” she says. “Bronwyn Artair?”

  “Yes, of course. Have a seat.”

  “As I said in my email, I’ve been watching you since I was in high school. You’re the reason I wanted to become a meteorologist.”

  Vince’s face relaxes and he laughs. “You’re not the first. But thank you. What can I do for you?”

  She probes his irises, tests the air. Yesterday’s sky fills her vision, the metallic clouds, the rain-perfumed air, the immensity of it all. “I felt I had to see you in person,” she says, slowly reaching for a rhythm. “I know I have a lot to learn from you.”

  “You said you’re from—?”

  It is suddenly clear, he doesn’t remember her email. He has no idea who she is though they supposedly have an appointment. “Originally New Jersey. But now I’m in New Hampshire. I do weather at WVOX out of Manchester.”

  He chuckles. “Ah, tame weather! You don’t have weather like ours back there, do you.”

  “We have plenty of hurricanes and blizzards.”

  “The difference is you can see that weather coming for days. You know exactly what it’s going to do.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I’m guessing you’re here to ask for a job?”

  The question itself does not surprise her, but she wasn’t prepared for it to arrive so soon. She wanted to compare notes first, tell him how she used to watch clouds as a child, lying in the backyard and staring up, imagining herself drifting among them. If only his face were a cloud she might rearrange, but it is immutable and deflecting; he is bolted in his seat like a heavy child on the see-saw holding her up at his
whim. She must shift the conversation’s terms.

  “Not a job exactly. Or at least not in the way you’re thinking.”

  He raises a single eyebrow, tips back his chair so it squeaks, and the sound releases something in her, and she takes the plunge, overriding doubt, looking first at him, then into the refuge of her lap, then at him again. She’s here, after all, she came here for this.

  “It’s hard to explain exactly, but something has happened to me that—I don’t know how exactly, or why—but I seem to be able to—” clearing her throat, smiling to please then consciously eradicating the smile “—alter the weather.”

  Vince frowns. The capillaries in the tips of her fingers twitch. Vince leans forward.

  “Excuse me?”

  She has piqued his interest. She smiles, this time intent on pleasing. “Yes, I know it sounds unusual, but I have a way—I generate an enormous—I’ve done this a number of times now and—”

  “Yes?”

  She rides the wave of his encouragement. “I stopped an electrical storm on Mount Washington. I have witnesses. I’ve also—”

  “Hold on, hon. Back up a minute. I’m trying to understand.” Vince leans further forward, his rutted chin in the lead. “Did you really just tell me you can change the weather?”

  “Well—” She grins, sheepish and proud. His eyes spark, two little fireflies. “Yes.” She has never said this aloud, and it feels strange and boastful, but if she’s going to confess this so straightforwardly to anyone Vince Carmichael is that person.

  “Let’s get our terms straight here. Weather—you’re talking wind and rain, thunder and lightning, hail and snow, humidity and temperature. Are we on the same page here?”

  “Yes.”

  “This isn’t a metaphor?”

  “No.”

  He nods, a long slow up and down that resembles bowing. “You said you stopped an electrical storm? What’s your technique?”