by Abby Geni
DARLENE AND I DROPPED JANE at the soccer field and watched her melt into a cluster of girls in identical uniforms. We went to the drugstore. We stopped by the library. At last, my sister pulled into her usual spot in the supermarket parking lot and sat for a moment with her head bowed. I did not disturb her. I waited until she sighed and climbed out of the car. Then I swung my backpack onto my shoulder and followed her.
Over the past two and a half years, Darlene had risen through the ranks of the grocery store. She recently attained the status of assistant manager, which came with a tiny raise. She could climb no higher; the manager was the owner’s son, and he had an office with a desk and a window, even though Darlene more or less ran the place. She could recite the cash register codes for every product. She could assume any task on the floor, sweeping, pricing items on the shelves, or bagging people’s groceries. Today she had been asked to spend a few hours in the stockroom taking inventory. My job was to wait and wait. I brought a stack of library books in crackling plastic covers. I sat against a wall and read about dinosaurs, listening to the cash register.
At the end of her shift, Darlene called me over to a table at the back of the store. She had a standing arrangement with her boss; any food that was destined for the garbage bin was hers for the taking. Together we pored through gallons of milk that were past their sell-by date, expired cans, and all the fruits and vegetables that were too withered for the customers. There was a carton of eggs, a few broken and leaking. There were apples with wormholes and potatoes sprouting green shoots. Darlene and I filled several bags. The bulk of my diet was made up of food other people would have thrown away.
On our way back to the car, we were intercepted by Mr. Carter, an elderly man with a cane and a frizzled mop of white hair that seemed to possess its own agency, coiling around his skull like the tentacles of an anemone. I knew all about him, of course. Mercy was a small town; everyone knew all about everyone else. Mr. Carter had run the pharmacy until his retirement a few years back.
“Why, it’s Darlene McCloud!” he boomed. “My goodness, you’ve gotten tall.”
My sister flashed a flinty smile and allowed him a brief hug, during which she did not set down her grocery bags, probably so she would not have to actively reciprocate. Darlene hated to be touched.
“How are you, sir?” she asked, stepping away quickly.
“Can’t complain. And who’s this?” He squinted at me, then pretended to stagger backward, clutching his heart in feigned astonishment. “It can’t be little Cora! Last time I saw you, you were knee-high to a grasshopper!”
“Yeah,” I said awkwardly.
“You look like your mother,” he said. “I remember her very well, you know. Such a shame! You’ve got her curls, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I whispered.
He lunged toward Darlene, prodding her with his forefinger. His mouth pooled open, revealing the plate of his dentures.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I want you to know that.”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“I know what people say,” he said. “But you did what you had to do. As far as I’m concerned, you can hold your head up as high as anyone.”
Darlene ushered me into the pickup truck. She eluded Mr. Carter’s attempt at a second hug with a sidestep and a wave.
“Old coot,” she said, once we were on the road.
I laid my forehead against the window, watching a row of white stucco houses spooling past, the landscape blanched by the sun into a palette of ochre and cream.
IN THE EVENING, WE SPRAWLED on the couch like a litter of puppies. The night was windless. The news was full of the bombing at Jolly Cosmetics, but Darlene insisted that we watch something else; the explosion had nothing to do with our lives and she didn’t want us to have nightmares. Eventually we settled on a reality show. Our tiny washer/dryer unit—a cube the color of hoarfrost—sat in the corner of the living room. There was some misalignment inside that made it rattle at the peak of each cycle, loud enough to drown out the TV, sometimes hard enough to shake the whole trailer. We could not afford a new one, and Darlene lived in fear of the day it died and left us with no recourse but the laundromat.
Eventually Jane went to bed. Darlene was sound asleep now, her hands interlinked across her belly, her breathing deep and regular. She had removed her glasses, and her face looked younger without them.
I stayed where I was, thinking about Mr. Carter again. I don’t blame you, he had said. I knew what he was referring to.
After the tornado, film crews and journalists had descended on Mercy like a plague of locusts, snapping photos of ruined houses and questioning hollow-eyed refugees. By and large, the town responded to the media assault with chilly politeness—a brief soundbite here, a reluctant portrait there, nothing too intimate. People then closed ranks and looked after their own.
All except Darlene. I did not know exactly how it all came about—I was only six years old then, and shell-shocked besides—but I knew that our family had gone on the record when nobody else would. I remembered being in front of a camera. Wearing my best dress. Sitting on a couch with my sisters. Taking turns speaking into a microphone. Tucker wasn’t with us—I was not sure why at the time. Someone handed me a photograph of my father and told me to hold it up and look at the camera. A strange woman with a fierce expression put makeup on my face for the first time. The lights were hot, my hands were shaking, and I was glad when it was over.
That was not our only interview. We had done quite a few. I could not recall the sequence, whether the newspaper articles came first, or the TV spot, or our photograph on the cover of a magazine. We had captured the public’s imagination: four orphans, homeless and destitute, perfectly pathetic. The requests came pouring in, and Darlene said yes to all of them, as long as there was money involved.
For a brief moment, the McCloud family became the face of the tragedy. I remembered sitting in Darlene’s lap as a cameraman told me not to smile. I remembered one headline in particular: THE SADDEST FAMILY IN MERCY. These words ran over a photograph of Darlene, Jane, and me, looking as lost and forlorn as stray cats.
Something about all this had been shameful. After the TV crews left town and the reporters stopped calling, it became clear that the people of Mercy did not approve. I was used to the way they looked at me, even now. A cloying pity. A hint of disgust. They patted my hand. They stepped up at the dollar store to pay for my school supplies. They greeted Darlene formally, as though she were a stranger. We had all gone through the tornado together, but my family now stood apart from everyone else. Darlene had sold our story; she had sold all of us. The stigma of that lingered to this day.
At the time, Tucker was angry. I remembered him turning away when the reporters approached. He would not pose for pictures. I wished now that I could ask him why—I wanted to ask him so many things—but of course I couldn’t. He had abandoned us not long after. I wanted to ask him how we could stop being the saddest family in Mercy. The words had proved as indelible as a brand.
4
On Monday, I went to Mercy Elementary School for the last time. I did not know this, of course. I did not know I was about to disappear.
The morning was unpleasant. The neighbor’s dog woke me before dawn. Beau was a friendly hound, never leashed, wandering around the trailer park at will, sleeping under cars and begging for scraps. I often fed him on the sly myself. Now I was dragged out of sleep by a howl—Beau barking in an irregular rhythm.
I sat up. Jane was still slumbering; that girl could sleep through anything. I pushed the curtain aside, noting that the sun had not yet risen. Beau was a shadow against a smoky landscape, the white patches on his back aglow. He was standing at the edge of the ravine and barking into the gulch.
Darlene’s voice rose from the other side of the wall. “Goddamn that dog to the pit of hell!”
I slid out of bed. In the living room, my sister was stumbling through the darkness
, tugging on a sweatshirt and her rain boots, the closest footwear to hand. She stormed to the front door, too angry to notice me.
The dewy grass felt good on my bare feet. The air was filled with the chorus of the first cicadas of summer. I squinted up at the sky, struck by the seamless gradations of blue that transitioned from an electric glow in the east to solid black in the west. A few stars still glimmered. Darlene was ahead of me, moving at a quick clip. She swept down on Beau, who continued to howl, his whole body rigid, his tail at an anxious half-mast.
“We get it,” Darlene shouted. “You heard something in the ravine. There’s an animal down there. Shut up! I’m taking you home.”
She grabbed him by the collar. Beau scrabbled at the dirt, trying to find purchase. I watched the two of them move down the road, their silhouettes straining in opposite directions.
I approached the edge of the ravine. The ground dropped away sharply, and the bushes and brambles made a spiderweb of branches that trapped the darkness in velvety pockets. I was not an animal; I could not hear what Beau heard, smell what he smelled. I wondered what might be hiding in that gully of shadows.
Over breakfast, I found myself out of sorts. Darlene was in the shower. The TV was on. There was a rainbow glint on the wall. Jane had hung crystals in a few of the windows. She thought them pretty, but I found them disconcerting, casting random flares of light around the place.
With a grunt, Jane slid into a chair beside me. She had her cell phone out, and the look on her face suggested she was texting boys. I observed her thoughtfully. None of the women in our family were beautiful. We all shared a rawboned angularity—strong foreheads, wide shoulders, stubborn chins—that had been carried down the genetic slipstream from our mother, based on what I had seen of her in photographs. I was a stick-skinny child, marked all over by the stigmata of growing up in rural Oklahoma: scraped shins, chigger bites, and scars from falling out of trees. I could not even boast a style of my own, since all my clothes were hand-me-downs. Jane had prominent front teeth and an oversized nose, yet she possessed a quality of loveliness that had nothing to do with her features. She was steady and still, her gaze perpetually unfocused. She always seemed to be thinking about something faraway. I envied her ability to escape the present, keeping her mind elsewhere.
Now she turned the TV volume up. A newscaster appeared, a woman with perfectly coiffed blond hair and a gash of lipstick. She gestured while she spoke, her nails glittering. Behind her, a diagram blossomed onto the screen. A sketch of a pipe bomb. From what I could tell, this appeared to be exactly what it sounded like: a length of plumbing filled with explosives and armed with a fuse.
It seemed that the police had run some tests. The blood from the crime scene was human rather than animal. To no one’s surprise, the chromosomes indicated a male suspect. It was a rare blood type and did not match any of Jolly’s employees. Therefore, it must belong to the perpetrator. The police were not sure how badly he was injured—he could be on the run, desperate for help. They would circulate a description shortly. They were testing his DNA.
The bomber had evidently crafted his weapon out of common household items. He took known elements—plumbing and gunpowder and thread—and transmuted them into something wicked. I was glad, at least, that no innocents had been injured. None of the animals had died in the blast, though they were lost in the wild now, unable to care for themselves. Seven beagles, thirteen rabbits, thirty-two white rats, and a chimpanzee were the victims of unwanted freedom. The public was cautioned to keep an eye out for them. They could not survive on their own.
DARLENE DROPPED ME OFF AT school a few minutes late. I trudged up the wide flagstone steps and pushed through the front doors to find the hallway packed with unsmiling faces. Kids jostled one another on the way to class. One girl stood at her locker without moving, her hand frozen in midair as though she had begun reaching for something on the top shelf, then lost the will to continue. All of Mercy Elementary School was in a bad mood.
I knew why. The tornado was often called “an act of God”—but to my mind, it was the opposite. My family were not churchgoers, but I had gleaned enough from the pervasive stew of religion in the Oklahoma air—as omnipresent as summer heat—to grasp the basics. I understood that God was order, safety, and the clear duality of heaven and hell. But the tornado had been none of these things. It struck without warning, logic, or pattern. A tornado did not smite the wicked and spare the virtuous. A tornado was just wind and air, and it took everything.
Even now, the neighborhood where the funnel cloud had touched down remained as a vivid, dreadful monument. There had been a cleanup effort: bulldozers packed the rubble into heaps and cleared the roads. But then the first barrel was found. A fifty-five-gallon drum. Jet-black. Stamped with the logo of Jolly Cosmetics. The steel was torn and leaking. The ground beneath was wet and rank with noxious waste.
The cleanup crew promptly stopped its work. The storm had done something miraculous and terrible: the funnel cloud had bypassed Jolly Cosmetics, roaring instead through the far parking lot to the east of the factory, where the barrels of hazardous chemicals were kept, awaiting removal and reclamation. The tornado carried and flung more than a dozen five-hundred-pound drums, hurling them like bullets across the miles into my family’s neighborhood. Smashed in ditches. Broken in riverbeds. Poisoning the groundwater. Killing the plants. Filling the air with acrid fumes.
It was the end of that place. These days, the region was no longer unsafe to pass through on your way to other parts of town. But our house and barn would never be rebuilt. The residents had salvaged what they could and fled. The local government was lodged in a quagmire of environmental regulations and lack of funds; there were town hall meetings on the subject every so often, but they never came to anything. In the meantime, the old neighborhood—unkempt and uninhabitable—lurked like the collective unconscious of the people of Mercy. We all knew it was there, but we did not travel through it unless we had to. We avoided it as best we could.
I did not blame Jolly Cosmetics for the fact that its chemicals tainted our town. Nobody did. The company had stored its hazardous waste by the book; then the tornado plowed through to make a mess of things. Human action caused the situation, but human intention did not. There was no fault, no guilt, only misfortune.
Now, however, some idiot had set off a bomb. Another disaster, but an avoidable one. It was too much. It was too much for everybody. My mind was slow to grapple with the idea of deliberate harm. A tornado was one thing, but calculated violence was something else entirely. Someone had willfully targeted our weary little town. Even before the storm, Mercy had not been a wealthy place. Now, three years later, the community was limping along on food stamps, welfare checks, and grit. There was only so much that one town could take. I remembered Tucker telling me that luck was no lady; luck was a mean drunk who didn’t know when to stop punching.
As the hours passed, there were more than a few meltdowns. One boy began sobbing in the middle of a lesson on cloud formation because his father worked at the cosmetics factory and could have been killed. Several children went to the nurse with stomachaches. People whispered about unemployment, back pay. Jolly Cosmetics was going to be shut down for a long while. Such a thing had never happened before. The place had been open for business the day after the tornado. The storm never touched it, carting off its waste while leaving the factory unharmed. Jolly Cosmetics escaped the maelstrom only to be assailed three years later by human hands.
At lunch, there was a fight in the cafeteria. I was eating around the mold on my sandwich when a soda can whizzed over my head. Kids began to vault out of their seats, a slow-motion explosion of bodies. At the epicenter, two boys wrestled furiously. The lunch ladies trundled out from behind the counter and separated them.
Later, I heard that an older girl—a fifth grader, no less—had been carried down to the nurse’s station by her teacher, screaming all the way that the town of Mercy was cursed. My
classmates whispered about it, passing notes back and forth. Seated at my desk, I considered the matter. It made a certain kind of sense. I spent my final hour of class wondering what kind of black magic had been cast on our poor, dried-up town.
The sunlight sliced between the blinds, striping the room with slats of golden gleam. The teacher’s voice droned over the scratch of pencils and the tick of the clock. I was not listening. Tucker was on my mind again. I could not seem to shake him.
I remembered the musty odor of the tornado shelter in the basement, the patter of rain. I remembered Tucker and Darlene working together to open the door. Furniture and chunks of masonry had lodged outside, making our exit difficult. I remembered Jane squeezing my hand as we stepped into what had been our basement and looking up at what had been our house. I remembered blinking in shock, dazzled by the unaccustomed sky.
For a little while, it stayed like that—the four of us against the world. Together, we met with a social worker. We always kept within sight of one another, never straying too far apart, often making physical contact, Darlene looping her finger through the tag on the back of my shirt, Tucker leaning his head on her shoulder. When one of us needed to use the bathroom, we all went along, Tucker lingering on the other side of the door. Everything seemed to be at a remove—vague and slightly unreal. A veil had fallen around us, blurring and distancing the rest of the world. Only my siblings remained unchanged. I sometimes felt as though I could sense them with more than my eyes—as though I had developed infrared vision like a snake. Against a drab, bleak landscape, only they burned bright.
For two weeks, we were nomads. We moved from building to building—the post office, the town hall, a stranger’s living room. We slept on the floor, surrounded by people who had been our neighbors, chilly, pillowless, and wrapped in sleeping bags that were not ours. There was never enough food, so we subsisted on vending machine snacks and juice boxes. There were no showers. I did not exactly mind the chaos—it seemed similar to what sleepaway camp might be like—but I minded the waiting. I minded that there was nothing to do. I minded that my siblings were behaving like survivors in a zombie movie. Jane was sleeping constantly. Darlene looked like she had just been slapped hard.
