The Waiting Sky

by Lara Zielin

  “Mom, don’t.”

  “He hates us.”

  “No. He just wants you to stop drinking is all.”

  “So I have to be perfect before we can have a relationship?”

  I don’t know about perfect. Maybe just better. And is that such a bad thing?

  “No, but we both think you drink too much.”

  My mom exhales. “I went to rehab, in case you don’t remember.”

  “I remember, but you still dr—”

  “I’ve got this under control. Come on, how bad are things really? You think you have it tough or something? You want me to tell you how it was growing up on the Iron Range?”

  She’s talking about the flat, scrubby part of Minnesota where she and Uncle Pete were raised dirt-poor. I know where this is headed. She’ll say that we don’t really have any problems. That she had it so much worse when she was growing up, when her dad would leave for days on end, and they literally had no food, and she and Uncle Pete would go down to the stream and drink the water just so their bellies would feel full. That I’m the one with the issues.

  Ethan steps close and puts his hands on my shoulders. “The van’s ready when you are,” he says, and walks away. I watch him go, thinking about how huge the space between us seems, even though it’s just from here to the van.

  “Janey? Are you ignoring me?”

  “No. The team just needs to hit the road.”

  “Sure. Leaving again. How convenient for you.”

  Something in me cracks. I can feel the fissures spreading on my skin, through my muscles, all the way into the veins in my eyes. “Don’t do this, Mom.”

  “Excuse me? Don’t do what? I’m not the one who left home. So don’t act like this is my fault.”

  I swear I’m going to break into a thousand pieces. And then no one will ever be able to separate me from all this coffee-colored dust, and I’ll be trapped in Kansas forever. Part of the dirt.

  “I just want things to be okay,” I whisper.

  “What, they’re not? What the hell is so bad about your life, Janey? Huh? Me? Am I ruining everything for you? Somehow I have these magical powers that enable me to screw up your life from way up here in Minnesota, eh?”

  “Mom, no. It’s not that. But don’t you think . . . couldn’t things be . . . better?”

  The phone is quiet on the other end, save for the sound of Larry’s in the background. “Mom?” I ask. “Did you hear what I said? Are you there?”

  The only response is hard silence as she hangs up.

  7

  I stare out the van window, replaying the conversation with my mom again and again in my head. The loop is making my head ring. The part that tolls the loudest isn’t about Mom. It’s about Ethan. His math-professor approach to our family drives me nuts, but there’s a secret part of me that envies it too. His ability to just cut ties and take off—what would that be like? I wonder.

  I knock my head softly against the van’s window, trying to stem the tide of thoughts. How can I sit here and think about leaving Mom the same way Ethan left us? I know firsthand how awful it feels.

  And yet.

  A dull ache spreads through me. Realization makes my stomach churn. I can fly my righteous flag all I want, and piss and moan about how coldly Ethan handles things, but when it comes down to it, I’m not in Minnesota either. I’m in Tornado Alley.

  I’m not just thinking about leaving. I’m gone.

  Just like him.

  The question remains: for how long?

  I tamp down my nausea and try to focus on the here and now. Step on the cockroaches you can see, and worry about the infestation later, as my mom would say. I concentrate on the other side of the van’s glass, where golden wheat fields roll into a jewel-blue sky. I stare at patches of trees reflecting the early evening light. We pass a sign welcoming us into Nebraska, “the good life,” and I tell myself we’re going to have a peaceful evening. Maybe grab dinner somewhere and call it a day.

  Everything is going to be fine.

  That all changes when I catch a glimpse of the radar screen that Ethan and Stephen are studying in the seats ahead of me. The colors are changing from dark red to purple, which I used to think meant the weather was getting less severe, but Stephen taught me that, no, purple actually means, in his words, “some heavy meteorological shit is going down.”

  Sure enough, Mason, who is seated behind me in the van, stops chewing on his third beef stick long enough to take a good look at the sky. “Anyone else think this baby’s going to produce?” he asks, squinting out the window.

  From the driver’s seat, Hallie glances at the darkening clouds. Victor’s in the passenger seat, navigating maps. “I think we’d better get off this road and go west,” Hallie says.

  “Next exit,” Victor says, studying the grids on his lap. Out here, GPS isn’t always reliable, so the team makes sure to have old-fashioned backups.

  Hallie flips on the van’s lights. The thickening clouds are starting to block out the sun.

  At the end of the ramp, we stop. Ethan curses softly. The road is crammed with vans, most of them filled with tourists—people who pay money to weather experts to see the storms up close. The tours are often led by scientists, but they’re not there to study anything or gather data. It’s more like whale watching—except with deadly storms.

  Hallie leans on the horn, but nothing moves. It’s like rush-hour traffic out in the middle of nowhere.

  “Dammit,” Stephen says. “There are more of these parasites every year.” The tourists are one of the few things that can make Stephen lose his cool. “There should be laws against this kind of jam-up,” he grumbles.

  Stephen always says it’s one thing if we don’t get data because we can’t find the storms, but he can’t stomach the fact that we might not get the information we’re after because tourists are in the way.

  Victor flips to another map to see if there’s a different way we can get to the storm.

  “Is it me, or did this supercell really blow up in the last few minutes?” Ethan asks. “You guys seeing this?”

  I stare out the window at the mass of gray sky a couple miles off. Supercells are bad thunderstorms that produce tornadoes. The edges of this one are rounded and billowing out, making it look like a spaceship hovering on the ground. I half expect to see aliens jumping out of it—but I know the only thing coming from these clouds will be a twister. If we’re lucky.

  The wind is so strong, trees and grass on either side of the road are bent with the force of it. On our first chase, I thought all the wind must mean a tornado was close by. But Ethan told me the wind is all the warm air getting sucked into the storm and giving it energy when it meets cold air. Lots of wind is good, but it doesn’t necessarily mean, for certain, that there’s a tornado around.

  “Get back on the highway,” Victor says to Hallie. “We gotta go back the way we came, then get on a smaller road and gun it.”

  Stephen’s head lifts. “Is the smaller road paved?” I’m relieved to hear him ask the same question that’s coursing through my brain. Lots of the back roads around here are dirt, and they can get muddy and dangerous during a storm. Ethan told me about one team from Utah that slid off the road and became stranded, only to have the twister land on top of them. Two people were killed and a third was badly injured when part of a fence went straight through his leg.

  “Looks to be,” Victor says. “We won’t take it if it’s dirt.”

  A few minutes later, the van is barreling south, and everyone inside it, except me (and Hallie, who’s driving), is trying to get more data on the storm. I’m pointing my camera out the window, watching the gray clouds pitch and roll against the coppery evening light. It’s beautiful and terrifying all at once. I want to snap the shutter, but I know it’s useless to try and get anything through the van’s dirt-flecked glass.

  Suddenly, we turn and are going west again, way farther behind the storm than I know anyone wants to be, but at least we’re on a roa
d that’s not dirt and isn’t crowded with tornado tourists. “The storm’s course is steady, but it is speeding up,” Stephen says. “We need to punch it.”

  Victor looks at Hallie. “That means pedal to the metal,” he says. From where I’m sitting, his profile reminds me of Abraham Lincoln—huge forehead, long nose.

  Hallie glares at him. “Let me drive, Vic. I know what I’m doing.”

  I think back to the hint Stephen dropped this morning, that Victor is being a dick because something happened to him. But what? As I stare at the storm, I think I see a telltale shape. “Is that—?”

  “She’s dropping a funnel!” Mason yells. He’s got his binoculars out, pressing them against his face, and now we’re all trying to focus on what’s coming out of the clouds. From this distance, it looks like the leg of a praying mantis—thin and jutting.

  As we speed along, the leg thickens and loses its awkward bend. The mass darkens against the orange sky. “God, that’s something,” Mason breathes.

  “I just wish we were closer,” Ethan says. “We need to turn back north at some point. When’s that going to happen, Victor?”

  Victor’s gaze snaps back and forth from the road to the map. “Shit!” he cries. “Hallie, go now!” Hallie hesitates for only a fraction of an instant. Then she slams on the brakes. I’m thrown forward so hard, my shoulder hits the seat in front of me. I hear Stephen grunt and Mason swear.

  “The hell?” Ethan asks as the van swerves and we’re suddenly going north on a road that cropped up out of nowhere. I right myself in the seat and blink. My shoulder burns from the impact. “What was that?”

  “I’m sorry,” Hallie says. “God, you guys, I’m so—”

  “You want to get to this storm or not?” Victor interrupts.

  “Not at the expense of people’s safety, I don’t,” Stephen says. He hands Ethan his laptop, which had been thrown onto the floor of the van.

  “So I’m putting people in danger again?” Victor asks. “Are you worried people are going to get hurt because I’m a constant fuckup? Is that it?”

  Stephen opens his mouth like he’s going to argue, then thinks better of it and simply goes back to the radar. From my seat I can see Hallie’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel.

  “Oh, no,” Ethan says suddenly. He makes me worry that maybe we’re too close to the storm.

  “Now what?” I ask.

  “Patchy Falls.”

  “What the hell is Patchy Falls?” Mason asks.

  I can see Ethan swallow, can see the way his muscles tighten. I feel mine do the same.

  “Patchy Falls is a town,” Ethan says. “And the tornado’s right on top of it.”

  8

  The world has gone dark, but the sinking sun has backlit the tornado, making our view of it literally rosy. Hallie parks the van on a small rise, and we all bolt out of the doors. The arctic air is biting.

  “Holy cold front, Batman!” Mason yells above the wind. He and Victor race to the back of the van to begin unloading the chasing equipment—most importantly, Polly.

  Victor kneels next to her, flipping switches and calibrating her devices. “What’s that new display?” Mason asks, pointing at a small screen.

  “She’s got self-monitoring capabilities now,” Victor replies. “Gets too wet, too hot, she shuts down. I think she flaked on that last chase because of the high humidity.”

  Mason punches the air. “Holy shit you’re a genius!” I zoom in on him to snap a few photos, capturing Mason’s open-mouthed glee. Then I move the lens to Victor. He’s stoic in the wind and noise, but I notice his hands are shaking. I wonder if every chaser gets so excited about storms, they tremble.

  Polly is barely up and running when Hallie points at the sky. “Look!”

  I train my lens on the distance. What look like splinters are swirling in the filmy air around the twister, except they’re probably tree trunks or limbs. Bursts of energy from exploding power transformers—or maybe it’s lightning—flare white-hot against the dark sky every few seconds. The wind is so loud, I can hardly hear my own thoughts.

  “I hope no one’s hurt!” I yell, then instantly regret opening my mouth. Once again, it’s filled with the dust and sand particles getting whipped up by the wind. I spit a few times into the dirt, trying not to gag.

  When my tongue is finally clear of grit, I snap pictures of Patchy Falls’ water tower and a short row of houses. The tornado spins behind them. I hit the shutter again and again, praying everyone in Patchy Falls has found a basement.

  I watch as the twister’s color starts to change from coal to a light blue.

  “It’s roping out,” Stephen says, his eyes on the churning sky. “She’s not going to last much longer.”

  I know this sucks for Polly’s readings, but I’m glad for Patchy Falls’ sake that the storm was on the ground for only a few minutes.

  Ethan’s got his hands on his hips, watching the tornado weaken. The howl all around us starts to quiet. “Did we get any solid data?” he asks.

  Mason’s studying Polly, his hair a shade darker thanks to all the dirt and dust that’s now in it. I can only imagine what my own looks like. “I’m not sure. Where did Victor go? He should probably look her over.”

  “I’m right here,” Victor says, walking up. He squats in the grass next to Polly. “If there are numbers there, I’ll get them. I can analyze everything tonight, once we find a motel.”

  “Not before we check out Patchy Falls,” Stephen says. “We need to see if anyone in that town needs help.”

  “Oh, come on,” Victor says. “The tornado wasn’t on the ground that long. Everybody’s probably fine.”

  “Lightning and winds still could have done damage,” Stephen replies.

  Victor rolls his eyes, but doesn’t argue further. Which is a good thing because helping people is the point of what any chaser does. Whatever data the Torbros or the Blisters or the other teams get will all be used toward one end: giving people more warning ahead of a storm and keeping them safe.

  Right now, though, the science is still a ways off. And here, real people in a real town have been hit by a bona fide storm, and some of them could be hurt—or even dead.

  “Let’s get this over with, then,” Victor says, and I’m suddenly aware of how clean he is. His Torbros T-shirt is free of dirt. There aren’t any flecks of mud or sand in his hair, like there are on the rest of us. Even his fingernails look clean.

  “Where did you go?” I ask him. “Were you in the van when the twister touched down?” I figure that’s the only way he could have stayed this impeccable.

  Victor turns his dark eyes on me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize we were all reporting to you now. Got a minute to sign my time sheet?”

  “Hey,” says Ethan. “Watch it.”

  Victor points a finger at him. “Then tell your sister to back off. Someone needs to be watching the radar. Okay? Plain and simple.”

  Except nobody watches the radar when the storm is right there. That’s like watching an event on TV when it’s happening live, right in front of you. Not that I’m about to say that, though. Victor stomps back to the van, and I pretend to check something on my camera until Polly’s loaded and we can go.

  Hallie eases alongside me. “Don’t take the Victor stuff too hard,” she says. Her cheekbones are speckled with dirt, her blond hair knotted and wild. “It’s not you. Everyone knows that it’s him.”

  “What’s his deal?” I ask. “Has he always been this much of a jerk?”

  “He’s always had sort of an attitude, but not like this.”

  “What happened?” I ask, thinking back to the conversation at breakfast.

  Hallie glances around, then pulls me off to the side. “Last season, we punched the core of this storm—”

  “You what?”

  “Punching the core is when you drive through the heavy precipitation and hail to get to the twister. Chasers as a rule try to avoid that because it’s super dangerous. But in this
case, we were desperate for some data. So we went through the core.”

  “What happened?”

  “First, we got pelted with crazy hail. It cracked the windshield over and over. And then the rain was so heavy, we couldn’t see the twister. It was a bad chase, and getting worse. Stephen wanted to turn around and just call everything off, but Victor kept pushing him. So we kept going and then suddenly Ethan yelled, and I was driving, so I slammed on the brakes. Next thing I know, it’s like this whipped-up fog is in front of us, only it’s not fog but the twister. The whole van starts to shake, and Victor’s window blows out. Just like that.”

  I swallow, thinking about the glass shattering on Cat and me during the accident.

  “I threw it into reverse and tried to get us out of there. I floored it, but there was this suction—the updraft. The van was hardly moving, just a few miles an hour. I thought we were going to die, one hundred percent. The whole van was rocking, side to side. And then, Stephen screams at me to turn the wheel so I’m backing up at an angle. Something about the wind shear. I don’t know, but he was screaming, and what else could I do? So I just did it. The van broke free of the wind, and the tires started peeling. But right as we gained traction, this twisted piece of metal came through Victor’s broken window.”

  Hallie glances at the ground, then at me. “There was nothing to stop it, and it hit Victor in the face. There was blood everywhere. It splattered the window and was on the seat. All over me. Victor made this noise, kind of like a sheep, actually. As weird as that sounds. It was this noise that sounded like ‘baaaa,’ but it was so much worse. I thought—I thought he’d died. I screamed and reversed us the hell out of there. We made it, but Victor . . .”

  The realization hits me. “His scar?”

  Hallie nods. “He was in the hospital for almost a week. He had to have so many stitches, and they spent hours trying to get all the metal out. The doctors said a few more millimeters, and most of the metal would have gone into his frontal lobe.”

  “Oh.”

  “The weird thing was, he wasn’t that upset about his wound. At least not at first. It was more like he felt he was a failure and he put us in danger. I think because of that, he was desperate to get back out in the field, to prove everything was okay. So, about a month later, at the very end of the season, he started chasing again. His first time back out, the setup was perfect. We were tracking a storm that had been building all day, and just about every chase team was on it. It was textbook, totally classic. But when it started to produce, Victor freaked. We were on this back road with at least ten other teams and suddenly Victor starts screaming. He’s blubbering and yelling and cowering with his hands over his head. It was so sad. And of course every other chaser around got to witness it.