Hurricane Kiss

by Deborah Blumenthal

  I hate good-byes. Always have, always will. They’re pathetically sad. There’s so much that’s unsaid. Unknown. And you know you shouldn’t think those big, possibly terrible things that you’re thinking, but you do anyway because you can’t not, so the best thing to do is say good-bye fast and disappear.

  No long portal good-byes, my mom always says.

  Her face is in full view one moment and then poof, it vanishes, and all I’m left with is a picture in my head.

  I’m not a total baby. This isn’t the first time I’ve left home. There was Washington, DC, for a week-long school trip. There was sleep-away camp in Massachusetts for eight weeks, the entire summer session. I was OK with it; I survived, not counting the first two nights in the bunk.

  But this is different.

  What if we get hit dead on? What if their worst predictions come true?

  Will my mom survive? Will Ethan? Will I have a family to come back to? A home? When you’re down to one parent …

  Don’t think about the unthinkable, someone said. I try that.

  It’ll be fine. That will be my mantra. It’ll be fine.

  Then I remind myself to breathe.

  RIVER

  Stuck in the passenger seat like dead weight, watching someone else drive. I hate that. Especially when it’s my dad behind the wheel. He goes slower when I’m next to him, like he’s doing a demo of how to drive. It makes me nuts. Is there a reason he is now doing thirty instead of the pathetic forty he could? To jump-start the trip, he takes the shortcuts, going on local roads. Traffic is lighter than normal.

  “So far, so good,” he says. Right, tough navigation, sir, like he’s kept the men under his watch alive on a jungle road with land mines.

  “Looks like our timing was perfect,” Jillian says.

  “Don’t be so sure,” I say.

  Not what I expected, at least so far. Did we manage to avoid the crowds? Everything looks the same, except the landscapers’ flatbed trucks are gone now. No roar of lawn mowers or leaf blowers spewing gas fumes, keeping life all tidy. It’s freaky calm.

  I sit back. The pill has finally kicked in. The guy who invented these should get the Peace prize. I can breathe, for a while.

  JILLIAN

  Being in the backseat rewinds my head back to when I was six and Ethan and I had a dad. A dad who acted like one until the novelty wore off and he bailed because he was a total asshole. He and my mom would take us on road trips, and they’d dream up games to keep us from getting bored and fighting in the backseat.

  “Take out your pens and write down the word, reincarnation, then tell me how many words you can make out of it.” Or, “I want each of you to watch the road and find a hundred red cars,” he’d say, dead serious.

  We jumped at the bait. I’d sit there eyes fixed on the cars, determined to count every red one that passed, or meet another cosmic challenge like searching for license plates from every state. Ethan always tried to one-up me. I never believed it when he said he saw Alaska.

  “Where?” I’d demand, and he’d laugh in my face.

  “You didn’t see it? It passed already. You missed it! You’re too slow!”

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” I’d yell. But, deep down, I did believe him. He was my older brother, and I looked up to him.

  I’d never admit it, but I still do.

  The games must have worked because I was consumed with listing all the license plates I saw in a spiral notebook, so I felt like a real reporter.

  Now the only plates I see are from Texas and Oklahoma. People from everyplace else had the brains to stay away. I stare at an Oklahoma plate: a lone Native American with a bow and arrow, taking aim at the wide-open sky. Something about that. I have to look away.

  We coast along smoothly, the tinted windows cutting the glare. Finally Harlan turns and pulls onto the 290 entrance ramp to Austin so we can avoid the traffic lights. Smooth sailing and then …

  Endless gridlock.

  The entire highway is nearly at a standstill, traffic stretching from here to the horizon. The next thing I expect to see is someone pulling out sleeping bags and setting up a tent.

  “Jesus,” River says.

  We stand still, inch forward every few seconds, and stop again.

  “Is it the number of cars, or is something wrong up ahead?” I ask.

  “Can’t tell,” Harlan says.

  “Is there anyplace to call for information?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Yeah, 911,” River says. “Tell them we are not cool with this. We want to be airlifted out.”

  “You’re a big help,” I say.

  “Right.”

  I try to Google the local news station and put in “traffic tie-up on 290,” but there’s no report on what’s holding things up. Then I go to the radio station. Still no news. There are helicopters flying above us. Why are there no traffic reports telling us what’s causing this? Is anyone monitoring it? Are they even aware of what’s happening?

  No flashing lights or roadwork signs either. People are getting out of their cars and shrugging their shoulders, exchanging words with neighbors and trying to come to terms with the massive jam we’re all part of. Half an hour, maybe more goes by and more people are outside their cars than in. A woman three cars ahead takes her miniature white poodle out of the car. She waits while he lifts his leg against the tire, and then puts him back inside.

  “We’ll be where she is in another hour,” River says.

  “Great,” I say.

  Harlan opens all the windows and cuts the engine. Sweat beads on my forehead. And no, lame brain me did not include zit cream in her essentials bag. Or whoa, not even Tampax, I now realize, and I’m not even sure when my period is due because I forgot my calendar, so genius me might as well throw herself out of the car and die now, saving Danielle the trouble.

  I stare at the back of River’s head. Not that he has to worry about zits or periods, and he can pee at the side of the road without searching for heavy cover. He rubs the back of his neck, and then maxes his music. I feel the vibrations inside me.

  18 HOURS TO LANDFALL

  RIVER

  I put my headphones on and blast my brain with music, not that it changes anything.

  I’m not roasting.

  I didn’t forget the second bottle of goddamn pills.

  I’m not imprisoned in a packed car.

  I’m not powerless to change anything, like a guy who got railroaded by a sick system of criminal injustice that puts your head in a vise and laughs when you scream from the pain.

  Live inside your head instead of the real world, the damn shrinks say. Change your perceptions. Pretend. Pretend. Pretending something can actually make it happen, they insist. If you believe hard enough. Believe? Hope? Those words aren’t in my vocabulary anymore. What I go with now is reality. Cold, hard, reality: what’s right smack in front of me.

  I sit back as music fills my insides like a survival potion.

  Chapter 4

  JILLIAN

  I stare at River’s profile as he gazes out the window. Jaw set stoically, with steely resolve. I can’t help thinking about how much he’s changed in less than a year.

  It had to have been football. Something to do with the demands of the game. He probably slept no more than four hours a night back when he was on the team. That was enough to make anyone crazy. Then there were the pressures of school and the need to keep your grades up to stay on the team, as well as for college apps the following year.

  He had no mom to cook or care for him, just a woman who cleaned once a week and then drove off. And every day he was pushed by a coach who had only one thing on his mind—victory for the team. Failure wasn’t an option. It reflected badly on the coach; it would mean that he failed. And Coach Briggs didn’t do failure.

  Did he p
ush River too far? Everybody has a breaking point. I heard rumors about drugs, about punishments, like making the players run extra miles when they screwed up.

  What happened to him? What did he do? Did he snap? Why hadn’t the story come out?

  What scared me most was when someone whose dad was a cop said that Briggs had an order of protection against River.

  That meant he was a real threat. It meant he was violent.

  RIVER

  The big guns are here with us. Doom on the horizon? I can thank my dad for moving us to Texas. For uprooting me from the best high school in LA, opening the way for all the shit that rained down on my head.

  I shift in my seat, jammed in, a cooler hogging most of the space by my feet. I kick it away and try to stretch, but end up smacking the roof of the car.

  “Take it easy,” my dad says, staring ahead.

  “If I could friggin’ move here, I would.”

  As usual, the world is closing in on me. On the radio someone is interviewing the head of the animal shelter.

  “For category 3 storms and above we evacuate the shelters,” he says. “Air-conditioned trucks are already in transit, taking our dogs and cats to shelters in Dallas and Austin where they’ll be safe.”

  Trapped. I picture them caged up in the vans, imprisoned. Scared, homeless, not knowing where they’re going or why. No one to comfort them.

  The memories flood back. I was staring out the window one day at the center and saw a stray dog amble by, his head down, desperately hunting for food. I wanted to call it over, to comfort it, but why give it hope? If one of the guards heard me, he’d probably shoot it just for spite and then laugh about it. Nothing was sacred there. Nothing and no one.

  Briggs could have worked there—he was just like them. He didn’t give a shit about anyone or anything. Except maybe his canary, which I never quite got.

  I always loved dogs. I begged for one when I was a kid. Big, small, brown, black, white, anything, I didn’t care what it looked like. I didn’t care if it had four legs or two eyes; I just wanted a dog of my own. Silent, loving, devoted, all mine. There were so many of them just abandoned, locked in crappy cages, depressed, desperate for human contact. I wanted to help. I wanted to take one home and give it a real home.

  I begged my dad over and over for a dog. We had a house with ten rooms and a backyard. But all he saw was a chance to lecture me about responsibility.

  “Who’s going to walk it when you’re in school? Or keep it company, or take it to the vet when it gets sick? Your mom and I work.”

  The love part got lost somewhere in his rant. What did I end up with? A stuffed one from Toys “R” Us. Seriously. It was worse than nothing.

  It’s still bright out, but there’s a breeze now. Entropy. That was a vocab word when I had English. It has to do with randomness, something like that, so it seems to fit now. What’s illogical sounds more logical when there’s an actual word to nail it down.

  Entropy also sums up my random life and how I’m powerless to change it. What if I hadn’t met Briggs? What if I hadn’t been thrown out of school? What would the rest of my life look like? Now I was sidelined, permanently. No cheering for me, ever again. Nothing I did would make a difference. I stick my head out the window just to get air, even though it’s roasting out.

  The only thing you can do is change how you feel about things so they don’t affect you in the same way. Not my words. Dr. Carter, the shrink my dad wasted $200 an hour on twice a week to try to reprogram my head when I got out, so I’d go back to semi-fucked from totally fucked. Talk therapy, endless talk therapy.

  Too bad it didn’t work.

  Reprogram my feelings about Briggs and football? Not quite. The insanity of everything that happened still makes my head spin. It started in LA when I went to tryouts on a whim after school one day when I had nothing else going.

  I stare out at the military trucks. Guys, just like me, standing around, looking lost.

  I hadn’t played football before, unless you counted the schoolyard with my dad and some friends. I was into skateboarding, swimming, snowboarding, high-speed stuff, defying the odds, making fast decisions. But I was open to something new. Maybe it was all about a secret wish to split my head open. Or more likely nail the cheerleaders. Who knows?

  Without much effort I became their MVP. I remember the write-up: At spring practice six major college coaches came from different parts of the country to watch Daughtry play.

  They talked about scholarships, cars, apartments, and the big leagues. They laughed about parties and girls. It felt unreal. My strength, the stunning pinpoint spirals I threw to my receivers. There was one word everyone kept using: potential.

  They saw something in me that they didn’t see in other guys.

  They were actually serious.

  When we moved from LA to Houston, I thought it would die down. I remember talking to my friend Adam online.

  “Looking forward to anonymity. Need time to just screw up, party, whatever.” I thought maybe I’d finally take more time and study acting. If there was anything that was the opposite of football for me, it was acting, and the world of living inside other people’s heads. My mom was an actress before she got married, and she always encouraged me to read plays and go out for drama.

  But the high school coaches around the country have some kind of old-boy network, and before I knew it Briggs had my number. I thought about turning him down, but my dad said I was crazy. Then he dangled an incentive in front of me.

  “Go out for football, and I’ll buy you a Harley.”

  I didn’t think I’d heard right. “You kidding me?”

  “I’m dead serious.”

  So I said screw it and spoke to Briggs.

  That was my biggest mistake.

  Chapter 5

  15 HOURS TO LANDFALL

  JILLIAN

  I wake up in a sweat. I must have nodded off. The trucks, they’re still there, stuck, stranded, like us. It’s been less than an hour if my watch hasn’t stopped. I stare out the window.

  “We hardly moved in an hour?” It just comes out.

  “Welcome to your highway burial plot,” River says.

  “Don’t say that!” Why is he like that?

  “Hey!” Harlan says, tapping the inside of his wrist on the steering wheel repeatedly. “This mission was badly planned. That’s the problem. That is exactly the problem.”

  He’s trapped too. Why didn’t I shut up?

  “The mayor screwed up. If they had evacuated us neighborhood by neighborhood, this never would have happened,” Harlan says. “It would have been organized, traffic would have flowed. We wouldn’t be sitting …”

  “Things got worse so fast it—” I say.

  “No excuse,” he says. “You have drills, you prepare, and you don’t let yourself be caught short.”

  “News flash, the world isn’t perfect,” River says, a muscle in his jaw pulsing.

  I had thought he was lost in his music.

  I stare at the soldiers on the side of the road, leaning against the trucks smoking, eyes darting back and forth. Some of them look my age.

  “What are they there for?” I can’t help myself.

  “Water, rations, emergency care, it’s not clear,” Harlan says.

  If we get caught in it, out here in the open? My heart starts to misfire. There’s no way they can have enough supplies for everyone. Is it all for show? Like the government’s trying to do something or look good? What would my mom say? I start to call her and then stop. What difference will it make? Anyway, she’s busy. Too busy to talk to me now.

  Out of nowhere I think of my dad, wherever he is in the world. Is he watching TV now like the rest of the country probably is? Does he think about all of us and realize where we are? He has to know that we’re at the center of this. Does he feel guilty?
Indifferent? Or is he in total denial? And what if he were here? What if I still had a dad? Would he be with me, or would he be out covering the story too, leaving me exactly where I am now, on my own to fend for myself?

  I hate myself for still thinking of him. He doesn’t even deserve that, but I can’t stop. I don’t deny I share his DNA. You can’t pretend that doesn’t exist. But the sad part is that, after all this time, I can’t get beyond the pain.

  I used to think it was my fault and him leaving was my punishment. I didn’t listen. I was always starting fights with Ethan, with him, even with my mom, because I always wanted my own way. If I behaved better and never fought, maybe my dad would have stayed. I asked Ethan once what he thought.

  “Do you think he left because of all the fights? Was it my fault?”

  “Right,” he said, looking at me like I was crazy. He took the book he was reading and threw it hard across the room. Then he walked out, slamming the door.

  All around us, people are getting out of their cars. They’re all feeling trapped too. We’re together in this, we’re all stuck on the highway, but really we’re all feeling more alone than ever. Everyone trying not to think about the real issues. Like whether we’ll survive. Whether we’ll have homes to go back to if we do. Whether life will ever be the same again.

  In the meantime, everyone is acting cool. People stand up and eat sandwiches, drain soda cans, change diapers on backseats, or do jobs to keep busy like pouring melted ice from their coolers, cleaning windshields, or shaking out floor mats, pretending they’re being productive and moving forward with their lives. But it’s all pretend, like I used to say when I was little.

  My world creeps to a halt. The universe is a giant still life with touches of indistinct movement around the perimeter. The earth has stopped rotating. I am an alien watching a movie about terrestrials trying to exit the planet in the face of a giant meteorite.

  Yes, I am going batshit crazy. The blistering heat is frying my brain.

  Harlan stops the car. I get out and talk to the guy in the next car because it means doing something rather than nothing. “Do you have any idea what the holdup is?”