by Cee Bowerman
“Why not?” Lexi asked her and I could tell she was as exasperated about it as Leia. “People would love this stuff. What’s in that cabinet?”
“That’s stuff he’s working on. Don’t ever open it because he’s got to have stuff put up a certain way so his clay won’t ruin.” There was a pause as I heard the door to the armoire shut. “Besides, he doesn’t like for anyone to see stuff until it’s done. I think he even has it locked up, but I’ve never checked. That’s his personal space, so I don’t bother it.”
I spoke from the doorway causing both girls to jump, “The whole room is my personal space.”
“Oh!” Lexi jolted and headed toward me so she could get out of the room. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s really not that big of a deal, babe. You can come in here and look, but like Leia said, just stay out of that other locker. That’s where I keep my works in progress.”
“Have you ever shown my mom this stuff?”
“Yeah, she’s come in and talked to me while I work on things a few times. Usually, she uses that time to take a bath and read though,” I shrugged. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal, Rowdy. I think that statue of Pat you did could come to life and move. It looks just like her.” Lexi looked so earnest as she talked about the small figurine I had made of one of the horses. “It’s beautiful. I wish I could do stuff like that.”
“If you’d like to learn, I’ll teach you what I know,” I told her. “Leia hates working with clay, but you might like it.”
“I think so,” Lexi said softly. “If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all, sweet girl. I’d enjoy the time with you,” I told her honestly. “Now, let’s get out of here. Did y’all finish your homework?”
Both girls nodded as they walked past me into the hall.
“Sierra’s making a picnic for dinner. We’re expecting some bad weather, so we’re going to just have it in the yard, but you can ride in the corral for a bit if you’d like. I bet your girls would enjoy it,” I suggested. Both girls jumped up and down for a second before they hurried into the kitchen.
“Go get your boots on and Rowdy and I will get dinner set up while the two of you ride,” I heard Sierra say as I walked into the kitchen. The girls ran past me and I glanced out the window to see that the weather was still clear. “Will you get one of those blankets out of the hall closet, babe?”
“Sure,” I turned and walked back down the hall and pulled out a big blanket we had used before and then went back into the kitchen to see if I could help her with anything else.
“I think I’ve got it. If you can carry the basket outside, I’m going to run to the restroom,” Sierra smiled as she closed the lid on the basket in front of her. “I’ll be out in just a minute.”
I took the basket and walked out the side door in the kitchen and across the porch to the grass. I picked a good spot where we could see the entire corral and spread out the blanket. The girls tumbled out the door laughing and ran off into the barn to saddle their horses. I watched them go as I sat down to relax for the first time today.
Sierra was on the blanket beside me within just a few minutes and I twisted around to lay my head in her lap as I took another sip of my beer. As had become our habit, Sierra and I talked about our day while she fiddled with my hair. Usually, one of us would read from our study guide and then quiz the other. Sometimes the girls took turns quizzing both of us.
I didn’t feel like concentrating tonight. I had a restless feeling and couldn’t shake it, so I knew I wouldn’t absorb anything we went over.
“Have you always had long hair?” Sierra asked me.
“Yeah,” I thought about it for a second then told her, “Since my mom died. Dad was always gone and he was so tired when he was home that he never thought to take me to get a cut. It got longer and longer and I’ve kept it that way ever since. I go and get it trimmed up every six months or so. I don’t let it get much longer than it is now.”
“You know, when I was a kid in boarding school, I never imagined I’d end up with a hot, long haired biker,” Sierra laughed. “It never even crossed my mind. My parents would have shit themselves.”
“Luckily, I don’t ever have to meet them, because I doubt I would be nice.”
“Will I get to meet your dad?”
“Of course,” I smiled. “He should be headed home in the next few weeks. He’s been working in Alaska to set up a new system for the last six months or so. He hasn’t been home since.”
“Is he as handsome as you are?”
“I guess,” I laughed.
Suddenly, a huge raindrop hit me in the middle of the forehead and my eyes shot up to the sky. The clouds I had been watching earlier had moved in fast and there was an eerie glow in the sky to the south.
“Babe,” I said as I sat up. “I think we need to take this party elsewhere.”
Sierra saw where I was looking and watched the clouds with me for a minute just as the sirens in town started to wail. Before either of us could stand up, I saw part of the cloud swoop down and start to swirl - the beginnings of a tornado.
“Oh, fuck! Get down into the shelter.” I jumped up and reached down to jerk Sierra up to her feet. I held her hand as I ran toward the corral and started yelling, “Girls! Get off the horses! Leia, take Lexi into the shelter, now!”
I vaulted over the corral fence and grabbed both horses' reins as the girls ran into the barn. I took off one bridle and was working on the next when I realized that Sierra was right beside me.
“What can I do?”
“Get in the shelter, goddammit!” The rain was pouring now, and Sierra and I were both soaked.
“No! I can help!” She shook her head and I cussed some more at her stubbornness while I focused on the buckle that was giving me trouble.
Finally it was off the horse and she ran to join the other one at the fence, both of them agitated by the weather now. I took her hand to run inside the barn when all the other horses rushed out in a line. I realized that Lexi and Leia must have opened the stall doors on their way to the cellar, so I let go of Sierra’s hand and ran to open the gate for them to escape if they needed to.
I grabbed Sierra’s free hand and ran with her toward the barn just as the rain stopped and so did the wind. It was deadly quiet all of the sudden, the only sound was the horses hooves as they ran out the open gate. I took a second to look over my shoulder right before we headed inside and saw a funnel drop down onto the field across the road from us.
“Oh, my God!” Sierra screamed from beside me, right before I jerked her into the barn and ran for the open door of the shelter.
I urged Sierra down the steps ahead of me, glad to see that Leia had already turned on the lamps we kept down there just for this purpose. I stepped down onto the ladder as I reached over to grab the metal door. When I glanced back out the open barn doors, I saw that the funnel was growing and it looked like it was headed straight for us.
“Daddy!” Leia cried as I slammed the door over my head and spun the wheel to seal us inside. I jumped down to the concrete floor and Leia threw herself at me. “Oh, my God, I was so scared.”
“It’s alright, pumpkin,” I whispered. “We’re all okay now.”
Lexi was sobbing in Sierra’s arms and I held Leia to me as I moved closer to them and pulled them into my arms.
After a minute or two, I pulled back and urged them to sit on the benches that lined the walls on either side of our shelter.
“Looks like we’re going to be eating our dinner inside after all,” I tried to joke. The girls were still sniffling, but their crying had stopped. They were sitting on each side of Sierra now with her arms around them. “Let me get the scanner turned on and we can see what’s going on.”
“That was terrifying. And beautiful,” Sierra admitted. “But it was a lot more terrifying than it was beautiful. Jesus, I can’t catch my breath.”
“It’s okay, baby, just take some slow breaths. We
’re safe down here, we’ll figure out what’s happening around us, have some snacks, and deal with whatever happened up there in a bit,” I told her as I reached for the scanner we kept on the shelf.
I popped the batteries into the back and it instantly started squawking. The automated voice warning everyone to take shelter immediately echoed through the concrete room causing Lexi to start sobbing again.
“You have your phone on you?” I asked Sierra. She shook her head. “That’s okay, the radio is enough.”
“Is it going to take us up in the sky?” Lexi whispered.
“No, baby,” I bit my lip so I didn’t laugh at her question. “That only happens on television and movies. We’re underground. And if it decided to take the barn above us, we would have already heard it happen. My guess is that it either went back up or it turned and missed us.”
“How long do we stay down here?” Sierra asked.
“Once the coast is clear, the radio will come on with the regular guy at the station. We’ll give it a little more time and then I’ll open the door.”
Leia jumped when the handheld radio in her lap beeped twice. Before she could pick it up I heard Grunt’s voice crackle through.
“Check in, we’re clear here, out.”
“I’m good,” Nicole chimed in.
“Safe here,” Leia held the button down and talked before she released it.
“I just went up and the sky is clear,” Grunt told us. “Safe to come out. I have nine horses in my backyard that belong to you guys.”
Lexi’s hand went over her mouth in relief that the horses were there together.
I took the radio from Leia and asked Grunt, “Are any of them injured, over.”
“Fuck if I know!” Grunt said from the radio. “There’s a goddamn turkey that tried to bite me, I can tell you that.”
The four of us laughed, in relief and at Grunt’s angry words, and Sierra hugged the girls close to her sides before she got up and put her arms around me.
“Can we move somewhere that doesn’t have tornados?” she asked me with a laugh.
“Well, our other options are blizzards, hurricanes, or earthquakes. I’ll take the occasional severe weather over any of those,” I kissed her on the top of her head and then pulled away to go up the ladder and open the hatch.
Once I had it pushed open, I poked my head out of our shelter and saw that the sun was shining brightly and there wasn’t a cloud as far as I could see.
“Well,” I said as I stepped out and then reached down to help Sierra and the girls. ‘What do you say we eat our sandwiches while we walk our asses to Grunt and Shannons and retrieve our horses?”
“I’ll get the ropes,” Leia sighed, having done this with me more than once in her lifetime. “Will you help me, Lexi?”
Lexi followed her down the middle of the barn toward the tack room. I walked out of the barn to look around and saw that we hadn’t even really had that much rain. The blanket was over in the flowerbed, but it wasn’t gone, so I guessed that even the wind hadn’t been bad enough to damage the roof of the house.
“This is very anticlimactic,” Sierra said as she looked around. “And, for the record, I am perfectly fucking okay with that.”
16.
SIERRA
“We got another letter in the mail yesterday and this one came with a package.”
“That bitch just doesn’t learn, does she?” I could tell that Marcus was irritated just by the tone of his voice coming through the phone. “Can you bring it by the office when you get off work?”
“Yes, I’ll drop it by. I’m off today, but have a few errands to run, so I’ll come by when I’m finished. I’ve got some of Holly’s clothes she left at the house last weekend, too.”
“Is it a purple shirt?” Marcus growled. “Because she’s torn the fucking house up looking for some purple shirt that she just has to have.”
“Yup. It’s purple,” I laughed. “I’ll bring it in with me this afternoon. I finally relaxed and started letting the girls stay home alone for short stints, so I don’t have them with me. Shannon is going to drop them at the house when she picks all the kids up from summer camp.”
“Reagan told me that you and him talked about that at practice. I’m on the fence about it.”
“Rowdy doesn’t think she’ll do anything. It’s been three months since she got out and she’s only sent letters. As far as we can tell, she’s never even left Lubbock.”
“Well, if the two of you are okay with it, then I’m sure it’s fine. I’m just not quite as trusting as your husband.”
“Yeah, I’m not totally okay with it, but we can’t live in fear forever.”
“Yeah, you can,” Marcus laughed. “Okay, I’ll see you at the office.”
We said our goodbyes and I dropped my phone into my purse before I walked up the sidewalk to Willow’s salon.
Three hours later, all caught up on gossip with my hair freshly cut and styled, I walked into Marcus’s office and was greeted by his assistant. I left the clothes and mail with her since Marcus was visiting with a client and then headed home to make sure my girls were okay since, once again, they had forgotten to call me and let me know they’d made it home safe. Since they weren’t answering the phone, I assumed that the two of them were out playing with the horses rather than getting the chores done off the list I had left on the bar.
As I drove, I worried about the girls being alone in the barn. Just yesterday, a man had dropped off a rescue horse for Rowdy to look after. The horse was very high strung and not good around people after years of abuse. Rowdy wasn’t sure that he would be able to save her, and had worried last night that she was too far gone for him to help her at all.
She had bucked and kicked inside the trailer, hurting herself over and over, until Nicole was able to sedate her enough so that she would walk with Rowdy into one of the stalls in the barn.
Early this morning, the drugs had worn off and the horse had started screaming and kicking at the walls of her stall. Rowdy had quickly gotten up and thrown on his clothes and boots so he could check on her and I had followed him outside.
He talked to her from the other side of the stall door, his voice calm and even, until she had finally worn herself out, foaming with sweat from her exertions. When Rowdy saw that she was calm, he reached through the bars to try and touch her and she turned so that she could kick back at him to get him to move away.
“I just don’t know,” Rowdy had worried as he watched her start to calm again. “If I can’t even get near her, I won’t be able to doctor her wounds or clean her stall. This may be too much for me to handle. She might have turned a corner in her mind that she just can’t come back from.”
I thought of the list of things I needed to do this afternoon and decided to send Rowdy a text and ask him to bring home dinner when he got off shift at the towing company. When I stopped in the driveway, I pulled my phone out and sent him a text message asking him to call me before he headed this way so we could talk about what he should pick up. My phone dinged seconds later and I smiled when I saw his reply.
“Sounds good. Love you.”
I dropped my phone into my purse and grabbed the strap of it to pull it out with me as I got out of the car. I was turning around to walk toward the house when I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look and jumped when I saw a woman I didn’t recognize standing just a few feet away pointing a gun at me.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
“And here’s the little wifey, home from town, getting ready to take care of my family,” the woman snarled before she reached up and slapped me across the face.
I reeled back in shock and turned to sprint into the house, terrified since I hadn’t seen or heard the girls nearby.
“If you don’t stop, I’ll shoot you in the back,” the woman yelled.
“Beverly, where are the girls?” I said after I screeched to a halt and turned back to face her.
“They stole my ba
by!” she screamed as she again walked closer to me.
“Who stole your baby?” I asked her quietly, trying to figure out what the fuck she was talking about without riling her up any more than she already was.
“Where is Rowdy?” Beverly asked as she used the hand not holding the gun to sweep her hair out of her face. “I told him I’d be here.”
“You told him?”
“In my last letter,” she said, exasperated. “Let me guess - he’s not here because you didn’t let him read it. Have you been hiding them from him, you little bitch?”
“Rowdy has gotten all your letters, but he refused to read even one of them. He gave them to his lawyer every time.”
I knew instantly that was the wrong thing to say, because Beverly’s face got red enough that I started to hope that she was having a heart attack or better yet, a stroke.
“I am here to pick up my daughter and my boyfriend,” Beverly took a deep breath and seemed to calm down. “Since Rowdy doesn’t seem to want to talk to me, I’ll just take the baby and my daughter and go.”
“Where are the girls?” I asked her again, terrified that she had hurt them already.
“I told you... they took my baby!”
“My... I mean... the girls took your baby?”
“God, I don’t know how he can put up with you if you’re really this fucking stupid. Yes, the two girls took my baby,” Beverly blew out a breath, but then her face started to get red again as she worked herself up. She screeched at me, “I don’t even know for sure which one is my daughter because I’ve never even seen a fucking picture of her. Can you imagine what that feels like?”
“No,” I shook my head. “I can’t imagine that. Where did the girls take the baby? Are they in the house?”
“They dropped down a fucking hole in the floor and locked the door behind them and they have my baby down there!”
“They’re in the tornado shelter,” I whispered, relieved. “Beverly, the girls aren’t going to come out of there until they know it’s safe. Rowdy will be home in a little bit and he’s going to be so pissed. You don’t want him pissed at you do you? After all these years?”
