by Nelle Davy
“Cal, are you finished?” she asked, already whipping away the plate from underneath him.
“Wha— Oh…is there any pie?”
“Yes and custard,” she said over the harsh scraping of food into the trash can.
“Cut me a piece, would you?”
“And me,” said Julia.
“I thought you said you were on a diet,” said Lavinia to her stepdaughter before dropping the plate in the sink.
“You—” Julia began.
“Ethan, is there a girl at school that you like?” asked Cal.
Ethan glared at his plate and strangled the length of his fork with his fingers. He never spoke about Allie back then. He hated talking about her: she was his, his alone. She was not for sharing and no one could make it otherwise.
“Yeah, there is,” said Julia, momentarily distracted as she rescented her old prey. “Her name’s—”
“I’m warning you,” Ethan said quietly still staring at his plate.
“All-iee—” Julia began leaning forward and stretched her lips to overenunciate the vowels “Lo-max.”
Ethan stood up, put down his fork and in a swift movement balanced the plate of food on its side with his wrist and hurled it at his sister’s head. Both she and her father ducked but the casserole and greens hurtled across the table before the plate shattered on the wall.
“Ethan!” Lavinia shouted.
“Jesus Christ, boy, what the hell do you think you’re doing?!” Cal roared, staring at his son, who, apart from two red circles on his cheeks, was completely calm.
Cal stood up and undid his belt. Lavinia put her hand on his in an instant.
“To your room, Ethan,” she said.
“No way, boy, you don’t go around breaking plates in my house like you’re some big shot—” Cal began but Ethan was already halfway up the stairs. He could hear his parents arguing below.
In his room he threw himself on his bed and vented all his rage at the ceiling. The white swirls seemed to take on pinpricks of black so that a swarm raged above his head and then the door opened and his mother came inside. That was when he realized he’d been holding his breath.
“You owe your father an apology.”
“Fine,” he said.
“And you’ll do extra chores as punishment after school.”
“Whatever.”
“You will sit up and address me like your mother when I speak to you,” Lavinia snapped.
As if on autopilot Ethan heaved himself off of the bed and sat up, his eyes finding the dresser to his mother’s left.
“Who is this girl?” his mother asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I don’t like secrets in my house.”
He sat in silence.
“If it’s a secret, it isn’t a very well-kept one if Julia knows about it,” said Lavinia nastily.
Ethan felt his face begin to crumple, but he drew in a deep breath and kept his eyes firmly on the dresser. His mother took a step toward him.
“What have I told you about showing your feelings to others? You should never have let her know how much it means to you—now she has a hold over you. You know that—how many times have I told you that?”
Ethan nodded.
“You will stay here until you are under control again and then you will apologize.”
“To Jules as well?” he asked.
“Julia,” Lavinia corrected. “Yes, your father insists.”
She turned to leave.
“Does this girl know about your feelings for her?” his mother asked as she reached the door.
“No,” Ethan said to the floor.
“Good,” his mother said before she opened the door and left.
Four days after that night, when it was the end of the school day, Ethan finally got lucky. He lingered behind the rest of his last class as always, because that was the class he shared with Allie. He stood by his locker, which was five down from hers, and using the slats of the front as both a shield and a view, watched her as she retied her ponytail and loaded her school books into her bag.
When he and the other kids went out of school into the courtyard for the school bus everyone craned their necks and looked up at the sky. The whole mass was a bruise of dark gray. The air smelled of rain and the clouds seemed to bear so heavily over the school and its discolored building that Ethan felt himself running for the bus even though it was not due to leave for ten minutes.
He found his brother and sat next to him. “Storm’s coming,” Theo said.
They got off at their stop, about three quarters of a mile from their house, and they started walking, until Theo turned around and said to Ethan in a low voice, “Don’t look behind you.”
“I don’t know why I said that,” my father said to my mother’s stomach. “Trying to tell Ethan what not to do was always a guarantee that he would sooner or later find a way to do it anyhow.”
So Ethan turned around and though he kept walking, his steps began to slow and though he turned to face the front, he couldn’t help but continue to twist his neck so he could see behind him.
There, as if in a vision, she was walking behind him, her ponytail swinging out from behind her, her back laboring underneath her khaki-colored canvas bag. Lightning forked to their left and above them the thunder cracked.
“Sure is getting windy,” said Theo but Ethan wasn’t listening. He kept looking behind him. His face soured and he gave a great sigh as he pulled the front of his hair down over his crown with his fingers.
“Why is she here?” he asked angrily.
“I think her aunt lives down around here,” Theo replied.
“How the hell do you know that?” spat Ethan, grabbing his brother, who promptly shrugged him off.
“Everyone knows that the Lomaxes are related to the O’Brians. Tammy is her cousin, you mouth-breather.”
“What did you call me?”
“I said ‘mouth-breather,’ what are you deaf, too?”
Ethan grabbed Theo in a headlock, who then both kicked out and tried to punch his brother in the nose.
“Say it again. Say it again, squirt.”
Ethan’s arms were so tight around his brother that Theo’s face was fast turning from scarlet to crimson. Theo threw out a vicious kick to Ethan’s ankle, which made him overbalance and fall to the ground, still holding on to Theo as he did.
“Mouth-breather!” screamed Theo, who was now lying on top of his brother and kicking wildly.
“Why were you fighting?” asked my mother.
“I dunno. We were always fighting, we’re brothers, that’s just what you do.”
“I’m glad we don’t have any boys yet then.” My mother sighed.
“Yet,” said my father, smiling as he stroked her stomach.
They were so busy fighting as they tousled on the sandy path that when Theo rolled back over Ethan, twisting his arm and holding him by it so that he was now standing over him, he didn’t immediately register that Allie had stopped walking. When he did, his first thought was that she was looking at them, so he pulled Ethan’s arm harder, as his brother bit back a yelp of pain. But she was not looking at them. She was looking at the plains behind them.
“What’s that?” Theo asked, letting go.
Ethan swung himself up into a sitting position, cradling his elbow. He kicked Theo on the shin and when he saw that he was hopping and holding on to it in pain, he was satisfied enough to look at where his brother had been pointing.
In the distance the sky was an encroaching force of black, but it was not this that he was seeing.
“Is that a dust cloud?” Theo asked eventually, wincing as he brought himself upright.
“No,” said Ethan, standing. “It’s not.”
Barely visible in the darkness, they saw a thin funnel rising up from the ground to meet the sky.
“You mean the other way around, honey.”
“Yes, technically, but when we first saw it that’s what we t
hought. I mean, we’d never seen an actual tornado that close before.”
“Whoa,” said Ethan.
“Cool,” said Theo.
“We gotta get outta here and quick. Now.”
“Hey, wait a minute—”
“You want to outrun a tornado?”
Theo stuck out his tongue as he grinned. “Fun to try.”
And then finally Ethan looked at Allie. Not the way he usually looked at her, not coveting and imagining her, but seeing her and her bags with the books already spilling out onto the ground beside her as she gazed in horror at the horizon.
“Hey,” he called out, but his voice failed at the end so he shouted at her again. “Hey!”
She turned to face him.
“That’s a twister,” he said, pointing.
Her face crumpled. “Yeah, I know that,” she said dryly.
“Yeah, well…well, what are you doing here anyway?” Ethan said defensively.
“He was never good with girls, you know? Just couldn’t relax, he was always so tense. Intense. If you’re a boy in there, and you need girl tips, don’t ever go to your uncle, that’s all I’m saying.”
“Theo, please don’t give dating tips to our baby. It’s not even born yet.”
“I’m staying with my aunt tonight. My parents are away visiting my grandparents,” she shouted back. She had to, the wind was like a roar in their ears, their hair whipping around their heads in crazy halos of gold and brown.
“Well, you can’t go there, you’ll never make it in time, it’s too far down the road—it’ll lead us directly into the path of the twister,” Ethan shouted back. He seemed to hesitate for a moment and then he started to walk toward her and picked up her bag by its strap.
“Jeez, Ethe, look at that!” cried his brother from behind.
The sky was forked with lightning, white lines that splintered the encroaching dark in intersecting patterns. The funnel stood out to them now; it was moving in a diagonal form across to the right of the path ahead of them.
“We’ll never make it back home before…” Theo trailed off slowly.
“Oh, my God,” Allie whispered.
Her hands were cradling her face and Ethan allowed himself to imagine that it was his hands holding her and comforting her and suddenly he felt his spine straighten.
“Come with me.” He grabbed her by the arm.
“Where are we going?” she shouted.
“Ethan!” called Theo.
“Theo, grab the bags and let’s go,” cried Ethan over his shoulder as he hauled Allie by her wrist, straining against the winds that were buffeting them with hard invisible blows.
“We went into the thicket, through the tall grass which was like wading through water, what with the winds. I knew where he was going—we’d been down that way loads of times before when we used to go exploring. She was hollering her head off but he wouldn’t let her go, just kept dragging her on with him while she cursed him out.”
“Where did you go?” asked my mother.
“There was this abandoned farmhouse. Totally derelict. It had one of those old cellars that you can get into from the outside with those slat doors raised up over the floor. Anyway we used to go in it sometimes and mess around and stuff. It was about ten minutes away, but it was straight on and it was a good idea in hindsight because it was farther on from the tornado, which was heading in the opposite direction. Otherwise if we kept on going home, we’d have ended smack-bang in the face of it. To be honest I don’t know if that place would have stood up to the twister. I’ve seen more of them since then and they can demolish a sturdier building than that if they want to, but we was kids, what did we know? And besides, Ethan wasn’t really in the mood for an elective vote.”
When they got to the cellar, Ethan pushed Allie inside through the crumbling whitewashed slats and down the stairs. By now she was both sobbing and shaking, and as she was dragged past the last step she wrenched her wrist away from him and went to the other side of the cellar. The only light in the room was from a small grubby windowpane on a concrete ledge just above ground level on the farther side of the room. The floor was covered in dirt and the walls were black. Theo crashed in after them and dumped the bags to the floor. He braced himself against his knees as he tried to catch his breath.
And then Allie took a step forward and smacked Ethan right across the mouth.
“You’re crazy, you know that?!” she screamed. “You grab me and force me to come here, you didn’t even ask me. You’ve no right to do that. When we get back to school I’m going to tell everyone how you kidnapped me and brought me to this awful place and Jimmy Galloway will beat the crap out of you.”
“Okay then, why don’t you go face the twister by yourself if we’re kidnapping you?” Theo shouted back. Allie stopped and stared at him disconcerted.
“Yeah, go on,” he sneered. “Door’s that way.”
“Theo!”
“I was a kid and she was being a brat.”
She eyed the door and then the boys.
“I wouldn’t like your chances,” said Ethan quietly. He hadn’t moved since she slapped him and the side of his mouth was red. Gently he dropped her bag beside her and then emptied his book bag and laid the satchel on the dirty floor.
“You can sit on that if you like.”
“Or go to hell,” volunteered Theo. “Just a suggestion.”
Ethan sat down on the dirty floor and hugged his knees to his chest. Theo paused for a second and then did the same. Allie stood there, caught between her anger, her disgust at the cellar and her fear of what lay outside.
“We were there for two hours in the end. Ethan didn’t say a word. At the time I thought he was stupid, I mean he’d been hankering after her for ages and then he gets his chance and nothing. Zilch. But actually it worked. ’Cause she sat on the satchel after a while and stared at him all guilty or whatever. I think she felt bad about panicking and smacking him one, though she had a good hand on her for a girl. So anyways eventually I got bored and went to look outside and whaddaya know? Clear sky, not a breeze, just dead flat. It was all smoky gray like how the sky looks after you put out a large fire or something, so we started to walk back and we didn’t see anything. It was like the twister never happened. Then we got back on the path to the farm and the nearer we got, the worse it was—trees everywhere, whole path was littered with branches and leaves, was like a forest shed itself all over the road. We had to clamber over what we could and then when it got to be too much, we took a detour the long way around, but we got home all the same.
One of the smaller cornfields was totally decimated and the barn was half-smashed in, but when we got to the house—”
The house was untouched, but before they could even climb the mound, Lavinia—swiftly followed by Cal and Piper—was running down to them. Lavinia shook Ethan so hard Theo heard his brother’s teeth rattle even though he was half-smothered in his father’s arms.
“They must have been terrified.”
“And angry.”
In the kitchen Theo explained what they had done while their mother checked them over, Cal poured himself a shot of bourbon and Piper rang Allie’s aunt to tell her she was okay.
“The roads are blocked so I guess you’ll have to stay the night for now, Allie, until your aunt and uncle can get over to pick you up,” said Piper, rejoining them from the hall. “They’re all fine, not too much damage by the way. They’ll call your parents, too.”
“Oh, thank you,” she said, cradling a glass of milk.
“Where’s Julia?” asked Theo.
“She stayed behind for cheerleading practice and they all hid in the school gym. She’ll stay the night with a friend in town until they sort out the roads,” said Cal. “She’s okay, full of tough stuff, like my boys,” he bragged and ruffled the mops of their hair.
“Dinner,” said Lavinia.
That night Allie stayed in Julia’s room. Ethan didn’t talk to or look at her all through the meal and
he went to bed without saying good-night to anybody at all. His father put it down to shock.
But in the middle of the night, he was woken up by the pressure of a small hand on his chest and the next morning when Allie’s aunt and uncle went to get her, she kept her eyes to the floor as they thanked my grandparents and the boys.
They climbed into their car to drive off, and Ethan watched them as they left, before putting a hand to his mouth on which a small purple bruise had already formed. He choked back a smile. Then he saw Theo watching and whacked him on the shoulder, and his brother promptly punched him in the stomach before Piper caught them both by the ears.
He did not see his mother’s eyes on him or how they flitted back to the disappearing taillights of the O’Brians’ car. Even if he had, it would have meant nothing to him…then.
“Will you tell me some more about your sister?” my mother asked one night when she was eight months gone and my father lay beside her, munching on a sandwich and reading the paper by his foot.
“What do you want to know?” he asked as he turned the page with his toe.
“I don’t know. Anything really—” she shifted and then amended her voice “—anything you want to talk about, that is.”
My father polished off his sandwich and then wiped his fingers on his shirt, before licking his teeth thoughtfully with his tongue.
“Did you like her?” my mother asked.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah, I did. So did Ethe.”
“When did you stop liking her?”
“It wasn’t really that simple. I mean…” He trailed off and sighed. “When your father ran out on you and your mother when you were a kid, did you stop loving him just like that? Did you think, well he’s done this bad thing, so that’s it—no more love for him ever?”
“No, not at first,” my mother replied. “But I did eventually.”
“Well, that’s because what he did meant a lot of hardship for you and your mother. He hurt you a lot.”
“So did Julia.”
“Yes but…what she did, it wasn’t meant to hurt us, it was just… Oh, hell, I don’t know, I’ve never understood it. I don’t think any one of us ever have.”
