by Sandra Brown
Although Carl doubted Myron knew shit about sibling relationships, the retard nodded agreement.
On a happier note, he said, “Your share of the money just doubled, Myron ol’ boy!”
Myron peeled his lips back in a wide grin.
Carl shuddered. “Jesus, Myron. Don’t you know what a toothbrush—”
The gunfire cracked through the cabin like a whip. He and Myron dove for cover.
* * *
David aimed his fingers toward the ceiling and pretended to be firing laser weapons at descending aliens. They were slimy, icky, ugly creatures with snot coming out their noses and hairy warts on their heads. They had webbed hands and a long tongue that could kill people if it touched ’em ’cause there was poison on it. Not even Rocket Rangers were safe. That’s what he was. Rocket Ranger XT3. He was the leader, the bravest of all the rangers. The aliens were scared of him.
“Pskoowou! Pskoowou!” He fired his laser weapon, and it blew up the warty head of the leader of the aliens. He had killed them all.
Rocket Ranger XT3, this is base zero, zero niner. What’s your position? Rocket Ranger XT3, do you read?
David adjusted his make-believe headset. “Zero, zero niner, this is Rocket Ranger XT3. Mission accomplished.”
He glanced over at his mother, who lay on her side facing away from him. She had come downstairs to get him, saying he had to take a nap. He’d put up his best arguments. He wasn’t tired. Naps were for babies. Kids on TV didn’t have to take naps. Rocket Rangers didn’t for sure. But a Rocket Ranger didn’t have a mom, either, who gave him mean looks that said he would soon be in serious trouble if he didn’t obey.
So David had trudged upstairs behind her, saying words like damn and hell and butt, ugly words she couldn’t hear.
That was one good thing about having a mother who was deaf. You could talk back without her knowing. And you could pretend to be asleep until she fell asleep, and then you could fire rockets and stuff and the sounds didn’t wake her up ’cause she couldn’t hear them.
But he had killed all the attacking aliens and so now he was bored.
He counted out loud to one hundred, a new skill his mom had recently taught him. Then he tried counting backward, but he lost interest somewhere in the midseventies.
He practiced clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth, seeing how loud he could do it. Whenever he’d done this around Grandpa, he would frown and tell him to cut it out, that it was rude and annoying. Jack hadn’t minded, though. Jack and him had had a contest to see who could do it the loudest. Jack could do it real loud. Louder than anybody.
Thinking about Jack made him feel sad again and he sorta wanted to cry, but he didn’t because that would be babyish. He rolled to his side and stared beyond the edge of the pillow into near space. Mom had said that Jack might not come back and he was afraid she was right ’cause when the police on TV took away people, they hardly ever came back. They got killed or put in jail or something.
If Jack didn’t come back, nothing was going to be fun anymore. Things would go back to being the way they had been before Jack came, only Grandpa wouldn’t be here either. It would be just him and Mom.
Mom was okay. She cooked good stuff to eat. She played games with him and didn’t get mad if he won. When he was sick she pulled him onto her lap and rocked him even though she said he was getting almost as big as her. Or if he was scared—or just ’cause and for no special reason—it felt good to let Mom hold him and lean his head against the fat part of her chest.
But Mom was a girl. She was always scared he was gonna drown or poke his eye out or break his neck or something. When she was around he couldn’t pee outside. She didn’t like farts, either. Girls thought farts were about the worst thing ever. At least Mom did.
Today when he was crying because Jack left, she had told him he probably wouldn’t miss Jack at all when he started going to school. She said it would be exciting to go every day.
Smiling so that her teeth showed, she had said. “You’ll learn to read.”
He had reminded her that he already knew how to read.
“You’ll learn to read better. And you’ll make lots of friends with boys and girls your age.”
He had nursed a secret longing to have a friend. One time Mom and Grandpa had an argument about him going to preschool. He hadn’t been able to follow all the signs, but most of them. He had sorta hoped his mom would win and that he could go to preschool and play with other kids. But his grandpa had said that Mom could teach him everything he needed to know at home, and that he would be in school soon enough, so he hadn’t got to go.
Maybe when he got to kindergarten he could get on a T-ball team. Or soccer. He might be good. He was pretty good at running and stuff. Maybe he could go to birthday parties like the kids on TV. But he wasn’t sure he would know what to do at a birthday party. The other kids might not like him. They might not want him on their T-ball team, either. They might think he was stupid or something.
He would sure feel better if Jack was around. He could talk to Jack about stuff. When he talked to Mom, she just said dumb Mom things. She said that everybody was going to like him and that he would be the teacher’s favorite. But how did Mom know that?
Jack would understand. But Jack wasn’t here. He had got in his truck and driven off with one of the policemen. What if he never came back? Not ever.
Wait a minute!
Jack hadn’t taken his stuff! He wouldn’t leave forever without his stuff! He would come back for it, wouldn’t he?
And then he got the best idea.
Cautiously, he looked over at his mom. She was still sleeping. Moving slowly, he inched to the edge of the bed. Watching her for signs of waking up, he eased himself off the bed until his toes touched the floor. One of the planks creaked beneath his weight and he froze, until he remembered that his mother couldn’t hear it. She would only sense a vibration, so he was very careful to walk on his tippy-toes across the room. At the door, he glanced back toward the bed one last time. She hadn’t moved. He pulled the door closed.
As he went down the upstairs hallway, he noticed how dark it was. His mom sure was sleeping a long time. It must be suppertime already. Maybe even past supper.
On the way downstairs, he halfway expected to hear her coming after him. If he asked her permission to do this, she would probably say no, so now was a good time. He could get there and back before she missed him.
When he came back, he would go upstairs and hide the stuff under his bed, then he would wake up his mom and tease her about being a sleepyhead and tell her he was hungry for supper. She would never know that he had left the house, something he was forbidden to do unless he had checked with her first. Never, ever, was he to go beyond the yard without her or Grandpa. The “yard” was the grassy part with the white fence around it.
It was a dumb rule. He was old enough to go to school, wasn’t he?
He unlocked the front door and stepped out onto the porch, being careful to pull the door closed behind him. On the porch, he paused. Everything sure looked funny. Sort of green and weird. The sky looked scary, too. He saw jagged forks of lightning and heard the thunder that followed.
Maybe he should wait and go another time.
But he might not have a chance as good as this.
Before he could talk himself out of it, he ran down the front steps and across the yard. He crawled beneath the fence and angled off toward the barn. As he ran past the corral, he noticed that the horses were acting strange. They were running along the fence, first one way, then the other, like they were trying to get out. They snorted and stamped, tossed their heads, and rolled their eyes. He wouldn’t like riding them today, not even with Jack holding the reins and leading.
He paused again, wondering if maybe he had fallen asleep after all. Was he having a dream? But when the lightning flashed again, he knew he was awake.
He ran faster. If he didn’t hurry, he might get rained on and then Mom would know that h
e’d gone outside without asking permission.
* * *
Despite his seat belt, Jack went airborne when his truck ran over a pothole. He banged his head on the ceiling of the cab. “Son of a bitch!” He swore not because of the pothole or the pain to his head, but because even though he was pushing the truck toward eighty miles an hour, it seemed to be mired in quicksand.
He had hit the pothole because his eyes were on the sky, not the road. He knew the warning signs because he had experienced them before. Once in Altus, Oklahoma; once in a small town in Missouri, the name of which escaped him now. When the sky looked like this, and the atmosphere took on this greenish cast, the conditions were right for a tornado.
He glanced at a familiar landmark as he sped past and knew that he had only a couple more miles to go. “Come on, come on,” he said, urging the truck to perform at maximum capacity. Thank God he’d had that oil level checked.
Raindrops as heavy as sinkers began spattering the windshield. A gust of wind disturbed the preternatural stillness. Then another gust, stronger than the first. In under a minute the branches of the trees lining the highway were in a frenzy. Falling twigs and leaves got caught in his windshield wipers. It began to rain harder. He glanced at the turbulent sky and cursed again.
The sudden rainfall after months of drought made the surface of the road dangerously slick. When he finally reached the gate and applied the brakes, the truck went into a skid. Managing to stop it about thirty yards beyond the gate, he pushed it into Reverse and fishtailed backward, then dropped it into Drive and shot through the iron arch.
His first thought upon seeing the house was that all the rooms were dark. Why weren’t the lights on? Were they here? Or had Anna, frightened by the threat of dangerous thunderstorms, gone into town to wait them out? Possibly with Marjorie Baker?
Jack didn’t even take time to shut the door of his truck. As soon as he cut the engine, he clambered out and ran up the front steps to the porch. Not bothering to ring the bell, he pushed open the door. The wind caught it, ripped it from his hand, and slammed it against the interior wall.
Although that made a racket loud enough to raise the dead, he shouted, “Anna! David!” He raced into the living room. It was empty and the television was dark. Running from room to room, he shouted for David. He opened the cellar door in the kitchen and hollered down, but he couldn’t even see the bottom of the narrow stairs for the darkness below. Besides, David would have replied if they had taken shelter there.
“Where the hell are you?”
Jack went back to the entry and ran up the staircase, taking the treads two or three at a time. David’s room was empty. He ran toward Anna’s and burst through the door. She was lying on the bed. “Anna!” In three strides he was across the room, shaking her awake.
She sat bolt upright, obviously terrified from having been awakened so abruptly from a deep slumber, shocked to see him in her bedroom standing over her and breathing heavily.
Knowing he must look like a wild man, he held up both hands palms out. “Where’s David?”
She glanced at the rumpled empty space beside her and registered alarm. Jack said, “There’s a storm coming. We’ve got to find David. Hurry!”
Sensing his urgency if not catching every rushed word, she scrambled off the bed and followed him from the room. They checked Delray’s bedroom, the attic, the closet in David’s room, underneath his bed. There was no trace of the boy.
Jack gripped her shoulders. “Where could he be?”
Frantically, Anna shook her head.
Nearly stumbling over each other, they ran downstairs. “I’ve already checked down here, but let’s do it again.” He took the time to look directly at her so she wouldn’t miss any words. “I’ll search this side of the house. Meet me back here.”
In less than sixty seconds they were back in the foyer. Anna’s hands were in her hair. She was seconds away from hysteria. Jack bolted through the open front door, ran to the end of the porch, and looked toward the northwest.
And saw it.
An angry finger of destruction dipping down from a curtain of cloud.
“Shit!”
He grabbed Anna’s hand and leaped off the porch, dragging her with him. She managed to land on her feet. He raced for the storm cellar, which he knew to be on the far side of the corral. Delray had pointed it out to him shortly after he began working for him.
Jack saw that the horses were terrified, and he regretted being unable to do anything for them, but they were safer in the corral than inside the barn, which could collapse on them. Even if they weren’t safer outside, his priority was seeing to Anna and David’s safety.
But Anna wasn’t cooperating. She dug her heels in as they approached the storm cellar. He stopped and turned to her. “Get in the cellar.” Even though it didn’t matter how loudly he spoke, he was yelling above the roar of the wind. “I’ll find David.”
She wrested her hand free and began running in the opposite direction of the cellar.
“Goddamn it!” Jack started after her.
She reached the barn seconds ahead of him and struggled to pull open the heavy metal door. The wind tore at her hair and clothes. Raindrops struck like needles, but she seemed unaware of anything except finding her son.
Jack pushed her aside and grabbed the handle of the barn door. “David!” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “David!” He jogged down the center aisle, checking each stall and the tack room, shouting as he went, but when he reached the opposite end, the boy was still not to be found. He slid open the rear door.
“Oh, Jesus.”
That he didn’t shout. He spoke it as a prayer.
Chapter Forty-One
The funnel cloud had spun itself into a full-fledged tornado, but it was still trying to decide whether to remain airborne or skim the ground. With every second it gained velocity and strength. The ranch lay directly in its present path. They had maybe two minutes. Probably less.
While Jack was still trying to assimilate their peril, Anna shoved him out of her way and dodged his attempt to grab her and hold her back. She ran across the open field toward the trailer.
Jack ran after her, overtook her, and kept running. As soon as he reached the trailer, he banged on the aluminum side of it, then nearly yanked the door off its hinges in his haste to open it. “David! David!”
The boy was cowering in a corner of the built-in sofa.
Terror-struck, teeth chattering, he said, “Am I in trouble?”
Jack scooped him into his arms. “Just glad to see you, buddy.”
Anna had just reached the door of the trailer when Jack leaped through the opening with the boy in his arms. “The cellar!”
This time she didn’t hesitate or argue, but instantly reversed her direction. They sprinted back across the field and past the barn. The distance had never seemed so far. Hard as they were running, it seemed to Jack they were making no progress, until suddenly they were there.
David was clinging to his neck so tightly that it was left to Anna to open the cellar door. She had difficulty lifting it, then the wind caught it and slammed it against the ground. Jack glanced over his shoulder. The twister had dipped lower and was cutting a furrow through the field they had just crossed. Faster than his eyes could register the bizarre sight, fence posts were being plucked from the ground and sucked up into the whirling funnel. The sound was horrific.
Anna scrambled down the steps ahead of him and David. Jack passed the boy to her, then fought with all his strength to lift the door up so he could close it. For what seemed like an eternity, he played tug-of-war with Mother Nature at her most ferocious. The tin roof of the barn was being ripped off sheet by sheet. One sailed past him. Ten yards closer and it could have sliced him in half.
Putting all his strength into it, gritting his teeth, he managed to get the door up, then ducked beneath it as it slammed shut almost on top of him. He bolted it from the inside.
Plunged into total stillnes
s and stygian darkness, and reeling from the battering he’d taken from the gale-force winds, he lost his balance on the concrete steps and stumbled down them.
“Jack?”
He followed the direction of David’s quavering voice. But it was Anna’s hand he found reaching out for him through the impenetrable blackness. When their hands touched, they clasped tightly. He moved forward carefully, feeling his way, until he was crouched in front of them, touching them. David’s leg, Anna’s shoulder, her hair, the boy’s cheek.
His arms closed around them. While the storm raged outside, he held them protectively. Anna buried her face in one side of his neck, David in the other. His hands cupped the backs of their heads, pressing them closer. Things were hurled against the cellar door with such impetus that David whimpered in fear. Anna felt the vibrations; she shuddered.
Jack whispered reassurances, knowing the boy could hear them, hoping that even though Anna couldn’t, she would be comforted by the movement of his breath in her hair. Her hand lay trustingly on his thigh. David’s small fist gripped a handful of his shirt.
And he knew that this was what mattered. They mattered. He mattered to them. All the rest of it—all the rest of it—evaporated into insignificance.
His throat became painfully tight with emotion. He squeezed his eyes shut to block out the loneliness of his past. He hugged Anna and David closer, cherishing their nearness. Their warmth seeped into him far deeper than his skin. This moment would be locked in his memory forever. Nobody could take it from him. This one time, this moment, he experienced love.
Jack could have held the embrace forever, but eventually David became restless. He wiggled free. “Was it a twister, Jack?”
Reluctantly Jack released them and sat back on his heels. “That’s what it was, all right.”
