The Stormchasers: A Novel (8 page)

“Oh no,” says Karena.

“Oh yes,” says Dennis. “My brother’d borrowed the car the month before and had a blowout, and the nimrod never replaced the spare. So forget outrunning this thing. There was a farmhouse about a mile down on the left, and I was just about to drive my sorry ass—excuse me—down there on the rim and take cover when this guy came along.” He nods at Dan. “With Tour Three. So we threw all my equipment in the back of the van and got the hell out of there.”

“Storms were pretty violent that day,” Dan says. “What’d that Gove County cell drop, an F-3?”

“Yup,” says Dennis. “Right where I was. It’s a pretty safe bet that farmhouse isn’t there anymore.”

He takes out a pack of cigarettes, offers it to Karena, lights one.

“So yes!” he says, spreading his arms. “Do I get scared? You bet I get scared! But that day taught me a valuable lesson. I never, never should have left the house without checking the spare. And ever since then, I carry this . . .”

He shifts to get at something in his back pocket and produces a Caribou Coffee notepad.

“The checklist,” says Dennis, cigarette clenched between his teeth. He flips back the cover to show Karena the handwriting inside. “Every day I ask myself, how can I make this chase safer? How can I make it better for the guests? What have I overlooked?”

He puts the notebook back.

“You can’t control everything,” he says. “That’s what makes chasing interesting. But the number one rule is, Be prepared.”

“Actually, that’s the Boy Scout motto,” says Dan.

“Well, that too,” says Dennis. “I’m the original Boy Scout.”

Karena smiles and shakes herself.

“Whoa,” she says. “That’s quite a story. Thank you for telling it.”

“My pleasure,” says Dennis, bowing his head.

“So tomorrow,” says Dan Mitchell, stretching, “I’m going to move one of you guys to her vehicle with the spare ham. Kevin?”

“No prob,” says Kevin, punching down his Whirlwind T-shirt, which has bellied up from the force of the jets. Karena realizes although he’s been listening the whole time, he hasn’t—rather uncharacteristically, it seems—said a word.

“Oh, that’s okay,” she says. “I can’t inconvenience you guys more than I already have.”

“There’s no alternative,” Dan says. “We can’t have you out of the loop. It endangers everyone. And media’s not allowed to leave the tour. Tim would have a fit.”

Karena laughs, although she’s not sure if Dan is joking or not.

“In that case,” she says.

She makes an apologetic grimace at Kevin. He raises his eyebrows.

“You’re all being awfully nice,” she says.

“We’re all Boy Scouts,” says Kevin. “At heart.”

Karena gets to her feet, water sluicing off her legs.

“Gentlemen,” she says. “I’ve caused enough trouble for one day. I’ll leave you to your beer. Thanks for the war stories.”

Dennis toasts her. “Thanks for the beer.”

Karena hooks up her sneakers with two fingers. She is halfway across the courtyard when she turns back. She still must not be quite right if she’s forgotten to ask them.

“Hey,” she says, “any of you know a chaser named Charles Hallingdahl?”

The men are talking among themselves again, but at her question they all look up.

“You mean Chuck?” says Dennis.

“Yes, right, Chuck,” says Karena, thinking, Chuck. Oh dear.

“Sure, we know Chuck,” says Dennis. “Everyone knows Chuck. Why?”

Karena stammers for a moment.

“No reason,” she says. “I mean—we grew up together. In the same hometown, and my editor thought it’d be cool if I could include him in the article. The personal-tie angle. He was always into chasing storms then too.”

She smiles, although her face is burning. From across the hot tub Kevin is watching her with that squinty, quizzical expression.

“Haven’t seen him this season,” he says. He looks at the others. “Have you?”

“Not for years,” says Dennis. “Man, Chuck H, that crazy mofo. Remember the time he—”

“We haven’t seen him,” says Kevin.

“Okay,” says Karena. “If we do run into him, could you point him out to me?”

“You bet,” says Kevin.

“Thanks,” Karena says. “Good night.”

She squishes off across the cement, swearing at herself. What was that all about? She feels bad for having lied to these men, especially after they’ve gone out of their way to help her. Saved her, in fact. She’s not sure why she has. Probably because although they may be too polite to ask, the chasers would certainly wonder why Karena and Charles are estranged, why she can’t find him any other way, and that’s personal. Family business.
We don’t talk about this,
Karena remembers Frank saying, as they drove back from the Mayo Clinic after Charles’s first episode, the one at the Starlite. Also, lying gets to be a habit after a while. Secrecy too. Karena sighs and picks up her pace.

In the back corridor she is struggling with the pop machine, trying to mash a damp dollar into the slot, when the courtyard door opens and Kevin pads up the hall toward her. He stops very close, and Karena’s stomach flips. Usually she doesn’t like people being in her space, but Kevin doesn’t feel like a stranger. He smells familiar somehow, of childhood maybe, water-heated skin and chlorine.

“Fear,” he says. He plucks the dollar out of her hand and leans past her to feed it into the slot. “I just wanted to say one thing about fear.”

“Which would be . . . ,” Karena says, watching the machine eat the dollar with its
vssssht
noise.

Kevin turns to face her. His eyes are not brown, as Karena thought, but hazel. Bright slashes in his round face.

“Fear is good,” he says.

“Do tell,” says Karena.

“Most people think of fear the wrong way,” says Kevin. “They fear fear. They get as paralyzed
by
fear as by
what
they fear.”

“‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself’?” Karena quotes.

“That’s right,” says Kevin. “But you know what? Fear is your survival instinct kicking in. Fear is your body’s primal way of saying I don’t have enough information about this situation. How can I get more information? How can I learn more to keep myself safe?”

“I never thought of it that way,” Karena says.

“Now, what’d you want?” says Kevin.

“What?” says Karena. “Oh. Diet pop, please.”

Kevin presses a glowing button and a plastic bottle clunks into the trough.

“Remember,” he says, “fear is good. Or can be.”

He looks as though he wants to say something else, actually opens his mouth to do so, but then appears to reconsider.

“Is something wrong?” says Karena.

“Not a thing,” says Kevin.

He hands Karena her pop.

“Sleep tight,” he says, “don’t let the bedbugs bite,” and squishes off down the hall, leaving amoeba-shaped wet footprints on the carpet.

K
arena has already shown the mullet photo to the clerk on duty at the front desk, ascertaining that although the hotel is full of chasers who have doubled back after today’s storms, Charles is not among them. But she returns to the lobby anyway to ask for a local phone book. It’s late, almost midnight, and her roommates will be sleeping. Karena doesn’t want to wake them by rummaging around for her laptop. She sits with the Ogallala Yellow Pages on one of the leather couches, then on impulse gets up, goes up the staircase past the mural of stagecoach and horses, and exits the hotel again onto the rear balcony. For some reason she is drawn to look down at the hot tub. But the chasers aren’t in it anymore, and the cover is pulled over it as though they had never been there. There is only the drone of eighteen-wheelers, invisible but powerful behind the cyclone fencing and trees, and a huge, fat orange moon.

Karena takes her cell phone from her back pocket, sees she has some signal here, and gets started, working her way through the motel listings. There is no Charles, Chuck, nor C Hallingdahl staying in any of them. Karena tries the campgrounds next, reaching mostly recordings, and then, in a last-ditch effort, the hospitals. Nobody has seen her brother. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, though. Charles could be using a fake name. More likely, Karena thinks, he is sleeping in his uninsured death trap of a car. Karena hangs on the railing, stretching her arms, and stares at the moon. The last time she saw it this big was when they were eight, and Karena told Charles a moon this size meant it was going to crash into the earth and kill everyone. Charles cried all night. Is he somewhere nearby, sleeping beneath it or looking at it too? Some instinct tells Karena he is.

Her cell phone buzzes in her hand and her breath catches—Charles?—but of course, it’s not. It’s Tiff. Karena flips the phone open.

“God,
finally
,” Tiff says. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day. Where
are
you?”

“Kansas—no, Nebraska,” says Karena. “Where are
you
? You sound like you’re in a wind tunnel.”

“I’m in the garage,” Tiff says. The
FFfffff
sound comes again. “I’m smoking. I just can’t take it anymore.”

“That’s not good,” says Karena. “Put down the cigarettes and back away slowly. Why are you in the garage?”

“That kid,” Tiff says, “I swear he has baby bat ears. Matthew, I mean. If I’m anywhere in the house, he’ll hear me and wake up. And he’s up like five times a night anyway. I’ve basically given up sleeping.”

“Oh no, Tiff,” says Karena. “I’m sorry. What about the pills?”

“Then I won’t wake up when he needs me,” Tiff says.

“But—what if he needs you while you’re in the garage?” Karena asks.

“Baby monitor,” says Tiff.

She exhales in a deafening blast of static. “So where are you again?”

“Ogallala, Nebraska,” says Karena, “at the Pony Express Lodge!” She says this with a flourish, her tone implying, Ta da! but Tiff is unimpressed.

“Whyyyy?” she says.

“Because we were chasing a storm today and that’s where we ended up, along with every other chaser in the universe. Except Charles.”

“Uh-huh,” says Tiff. “So you haven’t seen him.”

“Not yet.”

“Shocker,” Tiff says.

“Hey,” says Karena.

“What?” says Tiff. “Has it not occurred to you that what you’re doing is, how shall I put this, kind of . . .
insane
?”

“No,” says Karena. “I’m on a story here, in case you forgot. This is my job.”

“Pssh,”
Tiff says. “Whatever. We both know you’d never, ever be on this assignment except to find Thing Number Two.”

Karena can’t help snorting at Charles’s old nickname. “Okay, maybe,” she concedes. “But I
am
on assignment. And I have a good chance of finding Charles, statistically. Besides, what else would you want me to do?”

“Um, let it go?” says Tiff. “Get your butt home and get a life?”

“Nice,” says Karena.

The phone crackles as Tiff chuffs out smoke. “Sweetie pie,” she says, “I’ve known you longer than anyone, except maybe your useless dad, no offense, and I know how much you love Charles. I know you guys have this, like,
twin
thing nobody else can understand. But Charles is nothing but trouble, Kay, and frankly his problems are bigger than you can solve. What are you going to do if you do find him? Bring him home with you like a puppy?”

Karena, who has been pacing the balcony, stops and shakes her head. Because yes, actually, this is what she has envisioned. For years, all the while she’s been looking for Charles, she’s had this fantasy about him showing up on her doorstep one night. Footsore, exhausted, scarily thin. Maybe he has a patchy beard. He’s clearly been living on the street, or worse—his donated clothes don’t fit right, and he smells. But Karena asks no questions. She just takes him in, draws him a hot bath, fixes him a nourishing supper, and puts him to bed in her own room, with very clean, very cool new sheets. The next day, they go to the doctor together.

She is not so naïve as to mistake this vision for reality. She knows if she finds Charles—when—he may be balky. Resistant. Even, given how Karena left things with him, extremely nasty. But he has reached out for help, that call from Wichita the first signal in years he’s ready to take it. Karena doesn’t think this is so far-fetched.

“I could use a little support here, Tiff,” she says.

“Sweet pea,”
Tiff says. “Of course I support you. I’m just calling ’em as I see ’em, because if your friends won’t do this for you, who will, right? And frankly I think if you had more in your life, like a husband and kids, you wouldn’t be all tearing around the back of beyond, trying to find your brother.”

Karena is silent. She holds the phone to her cheek, breathes, stares at the moon. Do not say anything, she tells herself, her face tight with anger. Do not say anything you’ll regret. Tiff always gets this way when she’s nursing. After having her third son two years ago, Tiff and Karena were at Girls’ Night Out at Pepitos, and Karena was halfway through a description of a spectacularly bad date she’d just endured when Tiff smiled beatifically and interrupted,
You know what? Hearing this story is making me so happy to go back to my husband and babies
. Karena had felt as though Tiff had reached into her purse, taken out a small knife, zipped it up Karena’s cheek, and put it back again. It turned out Tiff was postpartum and on all sorts of drugs, but if Karena has forgiven the comment, she has not quite forgotten it.

Now she waits until her throat has loosened, then says, “You know, I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

“Oh my God,” Tiff says. “Don’t be that way. I’m just
saying
, is all. For your own good. You know I love you, Kay.”

Karena sighs. “I know,” she says, because she does. “Love you too.”

When she hangs up she takes a last look at the moon, which is higher now and white and unremarkable, and then goes into her room. Fern and Alicia are both fast asleep, inert forms in the beds, the air thick with their exhaled breath. Karena holds out the glowing face of her cell phone as a flashlight until she finds her laptop on the round table near the window. She tiptoes into the bathroom with it, flicks on the light, and bursts into tears.