The Waiting Sky

by Lara Zielin

  BY THE AUTHOR OF

  The Implosion of Aggie Winchester

  Donut Days

  THE

  WAITING

  SKY

  LARA ZIELIN

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS • A division of Penguin Young Readers Group.

  Published by The Penguin Group.

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.).

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa.

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England.

  Copyright © 2012 by Lara Zielin.

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Reg. U.S. Pat. & Tm. Off. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Published simultaneously in Canada.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Zielin, Lara, 1975–

  The waiting sky / Lara Zielin. p. cm.

  Summary: Minnesota seventeen-year-old Jane McAllister has devoted years to helping her out-of-control, alcoholic mother, but joining her brother in chasing tornadoes for a summer gives her a fresh perspective, new options, and her first real romance.

  [1. Storm chasers—Fiction. 2. Tornadoes—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 4. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Alcoholism—Fiction. 6. Family problems—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.Z497Vor 2012 [Fic]—dc23 2011025539

  ISBN 978-1-101-57558-1

  For Deb

  Contents

  Also by Lara Zielin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  “When you used to tell me that you chase tornadoes, deep down I thought it was just a metaphor.”

  —Twister

  “Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.”

  —The Importance of Being Earnest

  1

  Even though there’s a black wedge of sky in front of me that might drop a twister at any second, I can’t get my mom’s voice out of my head. Not even the sirens blasting in the nearby town can drown it out.

  “Come back home.”

  “I miss you so much.”

  “I’m no good without my Janey.”

  It’s Jane, not Janey, I tell her in my mind. Plain Jane. Rain-wrapped Jane. Never-again Jane.

  Not that I ever say anything. In real life, I let her call me whatever she wants because, let’s face it, reasoning with a drunk is a lot like trying to train a chicken. After a while, you just let the thing squawk and flap and hope it doesn’t escape the coop.

  The sky is really rotating now. The Tornado Brothers—or Torbros for short—have all gone quiet, waiting. The sirens are lost in the howling wind.

  At the far corner of the field we’re standing in, a tornado starts to descend. Dust on the ground whips up. I see the manic swirls of dirt and hay and grass, and there’s my mom again—all chaos and mess . . . and cleanup when it’s over.

  “Jane! You getting pictures?” My brother, Ethan, is smiling, pointing at the clouds. The winds have whisked his reddish-blond hair into a fauxhawk, which would be hilarious if he wasn’t standing a quarter mile away from a spinning vortex of death. But in the mouth of Mother Nature’s fury, Ethan’s totally at ease, and I wonder if it’s because he’s studied weather for years, or because he figured out a long time ago that the things that really hurt you don’t usually fall from the sky.

  I hoist the camera hanging around my neck and start snapping photos, even though I’m still not used to taking pictures in all this wind. The pressure changes are making my ears pop, and my mouth is clamped tight since I got dirt stuck in my teeth last week. But still, dirty teeth and life-threatening storms are better than being back in Minnesota, with my mom stumbling in and out of the apartment, and my best friend, Cat, trying to make my life Leave-It-to-Beaver perfect like hers, which I guess I shouldn’t be mad about. At least she’s trying to do something—trying in her way to help me—which is more than what I’d do if my best friend had almost killed me.

  The storm is roaring, but the twister can’t decide what it wants to do. Wispy funnels form again and again but don’t stick around long enough to become full-fledged tornadoes. I snap a picture of Ethan, his head tilted back, staring at the sky. It’s a funny moment to realize we have the same nose, but I guess we do—thin and straight and strong. It’s physical proof we’re related, I think. Biology’s way of linking us on the outside since on the inside we’re so different. Like how Ethan has a tendency to abandon people, and I’m the stick-around type. Or at least I was.

  Eventually he tears his eyes away from the clouds to yell at Stephen, the six-foot-six founder of Torbros. “Storm’s moving off!”

  “Yeah, but ’nother one’s coming!” Stephen hollers back, his voice rumbly like thunder. I look where he’s pointing, and sure enough, after a short break in the clouds, there’s another bruise-colored sky headed our way.

  I know this is the part where I’m supposed to feel the rush, supposed to get all excited about Mother Nature’s unpredictability, but the truth is I don’t. I’m not a weather junkie. I’m just here to take pictures for the Torbros website, a summer job Ethan rigged for me. Normally, I never would have left Mom for a day, much less a whole summer. But Ethan asked, and things at home were pretty messed up after what happened with Cat. So here I am. End of story.

  Except that it’s not the end of the story. No
t by a long shot—especially now that Ethan’s asked me to live with him after the weather season’s wrapped.

  As if he knows I’m thinking about him, Ethan’s face looms suddenly at the end of my lens. “We gotta go,” he says over the wind. “Hail in a minute. Get to the van.” He doesn’t even wait for me to reply—he just runs off to help load up some of the equipment with our tech guy, Mason, who has freckles covering practically every square inch of his body.

  I let the camera go and start jogging toward the van, but I stop when I reach Hallie, the one “sister” among the Tornado Brothers. She’s kneeling in the prairie grass, hunched over Polly, one of our weather instruments. The muscles on her thin arms strain as she works to adjust knobs and levers.

  “Hey,” I say, raising my voice against the storm, “we gotta hustle! Hail any second.”

  Hallie looks up, and her normally pretty face is crumpled. Her brown eyes remind me of the splintered wood and crushed houses we see after a tornado. “The data’s gone,” she says. “I can’t get Polly to work.” The wind tosses her words so quickly that I almost don’t catch them.

  I glance at Polly’s spinning instruments, taking in the buttons, switches, and meters covering her stainless-steel core the size of a small microwave. I don’t understand everything about how Polly works, but I know that—one—the Torbros love her and say she’s going to put them ahead of every other chaser in the field, and—two—we have to get her out of here because the minute that hail comes crashing down, Polly is toast.

  “Where’s Victor?” I ask. Victor is Stephen’s brother and cofounder of the Torbros. He had shirts made that said TORBROS: WE CHASE CHICKS AND STORMS, and when Hallie and I said we didn’t want to wear them, he told us we should change the word chicks to dicks, like that was all it took. Victor’s also the brainchild behind Polly, so anything that happens with her, he takes personally.

  “He went to get something from the van,” Hallie says. “The minute he took off, Polly crashed. I wanted to get her up and running before he came back.”

  I squint at the vehicle, but I can’t see Victor. He must be inside it, all buckled in, ready to take off. Which is nuts. If Victor has put his own safety over Polly’s, then the weather is about to get seriously bad.

  “Hallie,” I say, pulling on her arm, “come on. Get up. Victor’s not coming back. I’ll help you carry Polly, but we need to move. Now.”

  Hallie shakes her head, fiddling some more with Polly’s instrumentation. “No way. If I leave now, Victor will never let this go.”

  On our last chase, Victor made a point of saying that women belong in the lab, analyzing data—not out on chases. Me he tolerates because, technically, I’m not doing any of the scientific work. But Hallie—not so much. Which makes this whole situation more than a little ironic, considering Hallie’s the one out here trying to jump-start his supposedly beloved project, all while he’s sitting in the van.

  “Hallie—” I want to tell her that if Victor tries to say anything about Polly crashing, she can point out his ass-in-the-van neglect. But she doesn’t let me finish.

  “Give me two minutes.”

  I look at the churning green sky and feel the ice-cold air through my long-sleeved shirt. Hallie knows as well as I do we don’t have two minutes. The rest of the team is already in the van, save Ethan, who’s standing next to it. He cups his hands around his mouth and yells something at us, but it’s lost in the frigid, shrieking air.

  “Hallie,” I say, praying her name comes out like it does at home, when I say “Mom,” after things have gone far enough.

  The steely, determined look in Hallie’s eyes ebbs. “I know,” she says finally. “I know I’m being stupid. I just—God. Victor’s going to be such an asshat about this.”

  I nod, thinking we’re going to get back to the van just fine, when the first hailstone lands on my shoulder. “Ow!”

  “Shit!” Hallie yells. She scrambles to her feet, and together we haul Polly out of the grass, racing as fast as we can toward the van.

  Hail pelts my back and shoulders and head. I bend over Polly, trying to protect her, and Hallie does the same. I think about stories I’ve read where people get stoned to death and wonder if this is what they experienced. My body is on fire.

  When we reach the van, my brother and Stephen are just inside the sliding door. Their hands are outstretched, their faces white. They pull Polly from us first, then I toss Hallie at them. One last stone comes crashing down on my head as I throw myself into the van. Everything goes fuzzy and gray.

  My mom reaches me in my haze.

  “You’re there for Polly—for a machine—but you won’t come back to me in Minnesota?”

  I’m not sure if the pain I feel is from the hailstones or the guilt.

  My brother’s talking to me, but his voice is underwater. We’re all floating on dark waves. I press my palms against my eyes and let the blackness suck at me. I picture a twister carrying me up and away—past the clouds and over the rainbow—back to Minnesota. “Where you belong,” my mom says. “Home.”

  Except, of course, that Minnesota doesn’t feel like home. Not anymore, anyway. Neither does Oklahoma. Or Nebraska. Or Kansas, for that matter.

  I can click my heels together all I want, but there’s just no place to go.

  2

  By ten o’clock that night, I’m sitting outside in a plastic pool chair at a Days Inn. We’re still in Oklahoma. I think. Nothing about the flat-packed plains beyond the pool’s edge or the long line of lights on the freeway says for sure, one way or another.

  A breeze picks up and ripples the water. The pool is empty—it closed an hour ago—and I’m the only one around, which is a good thing. If legions of kids were still swimming, screaming, and splashing water at each other, the dull throb above my left temple would be even worse.

  The hailstone knocked me out for only a second, but my brother still called off the chase and made me go to an urgent care clinic. While the remaining four Torbros sat in the parking lot, we saw a doctor who told me to call him if I got dizzy or nauseous or couldn’t remember stuff. But ultimately he said I was fine; it was just a nasty bump on the head.

  I glance up as Victor files by, just on the other side of the pool’s metal gate. In the glare of the motel’s lights, I can see he’s carrying Polly. One of her dials is cracked, and I want to call out to him—to ask him if Polly’s going to be okay—but I decide against it. If Polly is broken, he might try to blame Hallie for it. And then I might try to defend Hallie, which could lead to a fight, and getting into it with Victor might not be the smartest idea ever. Even in the low light, I can see the pale scar that runs from his temple to his jaw. It’s the kind of scar that you get in a bar, where a piece of a broken beer bottle slices through your skin, or at least that’s what I imagine. Best to get news about Polly from someone else later, I think.

  My phone buzzes, interrupting my thoughts. I pull it out and stare at the text. Hope ur ok. I am thinking abt u.

  I stare at Cat’s message until the letters blur. I try to text back, but my hands shake so hard, I almost drop the phone.

  Cat.

  The accident.

  I can still smell the dusty interior of our battered Honda that day, when my mom drove Cat and me home from the mall. I can still see the way the sunlight lit up Cat’s cornflower-blue eyes when she talked about the cute guy in the food court. I can feel the silky fabric of the scarf I bought at the mall’s resale boutique. A vintage piece for sure, probably 1920s was my guess, and a steal at five bucks.

  And then.

  And then the screech of tires on blacktop, the shrill sound of the horn, Cat and me getting pitched forward so hard, our seat belts locked.

  We were in the middle of an intersection. My mom had run a red light.

  “Mom!” I cried as a car with the right of way sped past our hood. Another horn blared. My mom tried to gun it, but cars were still speeding around us.

  “What the hell?” my mom yelled. />
  Time slowed way down. A little squeak escaped Cat, who was staring out her window, watching a truck barrel straight toward her. All I could make out was a grill and glinting chrome.

  In the space of a half second, a thousand thoughts ignited my frontal lobe. My mom is drunk. We are stopped in the middle of an intersection. A truck is coming toward us. Mom’s reaction times are slow. We’ll be lucky if she hits the accelerator by the time the truck is on top of us.

  Finally, my adrenaline kicked in. “Go!” I screamed, hitting my mom’s seat so hard her head snapped forward. “Drive now!”

  Somehow, Mom’s pickled brain responded. We jerked into motion as another car swerved around our front, its horn thundering. I thought I smelled burning rubber, and wondered if it was our tires, or the tires of the truck that was now so close, I thought I could see the wide eyes and open mouth of its driver.

  We were moving, but the truck still clipped our rear, shattering the back windshield. Glass came raining down on Cat and me in razor-sharp drops. The Honda spun around again and again. I remember thinking there was an earthquake happening, and what a funny time for that to occur—in Minnesota, no less, where we weren’t supposed to have them. It wasn’t until later I realized the whole car was shaking with the tremor of the truck’s ginormous wheels, inches from running us all over.

  When the world stopped spinning and shaking, the car was on the other side of the intersection—facing the right way, of all things. As if nothing had happened.

  Except, when I looked out the now-missing back windshield—where scraps of glass clung to the edges like those stalagmites we learned about in fourth-grade geology—I saw the truck that had rammed us was jackknifed in the middle of the intersection. Two more cars had come careering to a halt at odd angles around it.

  I looked over at Cat, my mouth open. Blood was trickling down her face from her left eyebrow, where a piece of glass the size of a bottle cap was wedged in her skin. There was a sour taste in my throat, and I wondered if it was the taste of fear. “Cat—”