The Waiting Sky (3 page)

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to Cat. It was the only thing I could think to say. We’d brought the hurricane of our lives into Cat’s perfect house, and now we were taking off like we hadn’t just torn everything up.

“Me too,” Cat said, wiping away tears. “This is pretty fucked up.”

I touched the glass in my cheeks. It was starting to feel hot. “I have to fix my face,” I said.

Cat looked at me hard. “Jane. You have to fix your
life
.”

* * *

Back at the Days Inn, I delete Cat’s text and shove the phone into my pocket. I figure I’ll write her later when I can get a better handle on my thoughts, when I can find some new way to tell her I’m doing fine down here. I’m fixing my life! And it’s awesome!

Which is of course bullshit. Other than take some pictures, I haven’t exactly done
anything
. At least not according to Cat’s definition of what fixing my life means.

I hear the slam of a van door and see my brother walking by, carrying a laptop under one arm. His weight is mostly on the balls of his feet, meaning he moves quietly and quickly—the same way he did when we were kids and we had to sneak around the house without waking Mom up.

“Ethan,” I say, and he stops like he’s surprised to hear my voice. He slides his room card through the reader on the pool gate, then scrapes the legs of a chair across the concrete to sit next to me. The water’s reflection paints him in giraffe prints of light.

“How are you feeling?” he asks, glancing at my head where the hailstone hit.

“Better,” I say, studying Ethan’s gray-blue eyes, the same as mine. We both have the same coarse, red-blond hair, same angular cheekbones and sharp jawline. On Ethan, the result is breathtaking—he could be a model if he wasn’t a meteorologist. On me, the lines are too severe. I wish for more softness, more curves. But I’m bones and edges through and through. Just like Mom—physically, anyway.

I motion to the laptop. “Are you running the data? On today’s chase?”

Ethan nods. “Even with Polly going down, we were still able to get some good measurements.”

Most of the Torbros are PhD students at the University of Oklahoma, and their tornado work is funded through a grant. The goal for the summer is to use the grant money to document just about everything that happens around a tornado: temperature changes, wind speeds, barometric pressure readings, and other stuff I can barely get my mind around. With any luck, it will help them better understand how tornadoes form and why. Because, as common as they are, a lot about them is still a mystery.

Ethan rubs the bridge of his nose. I know this gesture—he does it when he’s thinking hard. And no wonder. The Torbros aren’t the only team out here doing this kind of work. There’s hard-core competition from other chasers not just to get to the storms, but to figure out new ways to measure and study them. The team that’s going to survive long term is the one that can get extra innovative and extra ballsy on chases, and at the same time figure out how to use the grant money as a bridge to something profitable and sustainable.

Which is where Polly comes in. She measures toxins and pollutants in the air around a tornado, since the Torbros’ theory is that the more toxins present in the atmosphere, the more a tornado can spin, and the more destructive it will be. With any luck, the Torbros will be able to use Polly to help predict a tornado’s intensity based on how polluted the air around it is, then duplicate her technology and sell it to other chasers and researchers.

Ethan’s fingers squeeze at the place where his nose meets his forehead. Another sign that he’s deep in thought. Or stressed. Or both. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen him do that. Last time we were together was two years ago. He came home for Christmas Day, then left the next morning. He said it was because he had research back at the lab that couldn’t wait, but his tired frown and slumped shoulders told the truth: he was miserable at home. Which probably explains why he skipped town the minute he had his high school diploma, too. He barely waved as he roared away in his old Ford. He was eighteen when he fled; I was twelve.

Like he can sense my thoughts, Ethan clears his throat. “Seeing you get hurt today—it was tough. It made me realize that in the three weeks you’ve been down here, I’ve never told you how glad I am you made the trip.”

I shift in my chair. I’m not used to the two of us having warm fuzzy moments.

“I’ve been trying to get you down here for ages, you know,” Ethan continues. “And I meant what I said about you staying on after the season wraps. I know it’s probably tough to think about, but I hope you’ll consider it.”

Tough to think about
doesn’t even begin to cover it. In the past, Mom hated when Ethan sent me e-mails asking me to come to Oklahoma and visit. “I’m so proud of everything he’s been able to do,” she’d say by way of qualifying what came next, “but
he
should really come to
us
. Family doesn’t leave family. You shouldn’t have to go down there and split us up even more.” She’d freak if she knew he wanted me to come
live
with him.

“I will,” I say. “I’ll think about it.”
On my own, by myself
. I don’t add the last part only because Ethan will probably argue with me about how he understands better than anyone what life with Mom is like, even though he’s been gone for
years.

“You haven’t said much about Mom and how things are with her,” Ethan says, picking at the arm of the pool chair, “but if you want to talk about it, I’m here.”

I swallow more irritation. I know he’s trying to be helpful, and yeah, Ethan might not have walked out on us the way Mom likes to paint it, but he
did
leave. And now he suddenly wants to know how things are? Well, the way they are is great.

Awesome. Never better.

I stare at my fingernails. It’s all lies, of course, but what am I supposed to tell him? About how we almost killed Cat? About how, right before I left, Mom peed in her own bed?
No one
needs to know that level of detail.

“I’m okay,” I say, offering as little as possible. If I know to keep my mouth shut when arguing with a drunk, then I sure as heck have enough sense to keep it shut around a PhD student who could probably source a dissertation on what I had for breakfast.

“You could talk to someone else,” Ethan offers. “If you didn’t want to talk to me.”

“Like who?”

Ethan shrugs. “Maybe just someone who’s super experienced in this kind of stuff and who could really listen. And help.”

I suddenly understand his meaning. “A shrink.”

“A
professional
.”

“Why do you seem to think there’s so much wrong with me?” I ask.

Ethan exhales, probably willing himself to be patient. “It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with you, per se. I think that the situation with Mom is messed up.”

Messed up
. The expression makes it sound like there are just a few things out of place here and there, which might describe most days with Mom, but not all of them. Certainly not the day I came home from school to find her passed out under our apartment building’s bushes, topless. There were two neighborhood kids standing over her, taking pictures with their cell phones.

Messed up
doesn’t really do justice to the red spots of rage and humiliation that blinded me before I could scream at the kids to leave her alone and get the hell out of there.
Messed up
doesn’t really cover the way the screaming didn’t stop when I put my hands underneath her armpits and dragged her out of there—facedown, no less, so no one else would see her breasts. And
messed up
doesn’t really describe how neighbors just shrugged it off, no one bothering to help us, because they’d been there, seen it, done it with the drunk lady and her daughter. Neither does
messed up
really convey the way I couldn’t
stop
screaming, not even when we were back in the apartment, or the rawness at the back of my throat afterward that kept me hoarse for two days. Which was just as well, I suppose, because once my mom came to, I had no idea what to say to her.

How does Ethan expect me to talk to a stranger about that kind of stuff? I couldn’t—
wouldn’t
—because that’s not how problems get fixed in my world. You just go through it. You deal with it. You survive one day and move on to the next.

“I’m not sure about the shrink thing,” I say finally. “It’s probably not for me.”

Ethan nods. “Fair enough. But think about it, okay? It’s been a rough year for you. And Mom. Speaking of which, how’s Mom been handling the Uncle Pete thing?”

The black hole in my heart yawns. I struggle to close it, to neutralize the gravitational pull of my pain. Uncle Pete was my mom’s brother, and he died this past winter by freezing to death in his car. He was a drug addict, and homeless, and we never talked to him much. But Mom took his death hard, blaming herself for it, telling me—and anyone else who would listen—that she should have done more to save him.

“That good, huh?” Ethan asks, studying my face.

“He was her
brother,
” I say, more defensively than I mean to. “She’s really upset.” So much so that for these past few months, she’d started hitting Larry’s, the neighborhood bar, hard. Not to mention the local party store. Since Uncle Pete died, the cost of her drinking has started to outweigh the cost of anything else in our house—even rent.

“She putting her pain into the bottle, then?” Ethan asks, as if my thoughts are just laid right there on the pool deck for him to read.

“Not really,” I lie. “It was tough for a little bit, but now she’s fine.”

Ethan gives me this funny look like,
poor kid
, and I wonder if he thinks asking these questions, or having me around this summer, makes him
so
generous. Like he’s
so
involved now or something. But really it’s the least he can do, considering he gets a charmed life as a handsome researcher down here in Oklahoma and I’m trying to hold everything together back in Minnesota.

Except Ethan’s on your side,
I tell myself, remembering the time Ethan taught me to cook macaroni and cheese, and when he drove to the drugstore to get me tampons when I got my first period, even though his friend Trey worked there and might have seen him.

“Look,” I say, “can we just drop this? Home is home. Here is here. Let’s not mix the two, okay?”

Ethan runs a hand along the tanned back of his neck as if he’s not quite sure about that idea. For a second, he looks like the
only
thing he wants is for those things to mix. But a moment later, he’s eyeing the camera bag at my feet. “So, you want to go through your pictures from today and pick some to put up on the website?”

I nod, relieved that we’re onto a different subject. I grab the camera, and Ethan scoots in closer. Together, we flip through the images on my small screen.

“This one’s really good,” he says, pointing at a picture of silvery leaves tossed by a wind gust. Afternoon light slants through the dust behind them.

“Thanks,” I say, my heart swelling. The picture had been one of my favorites too, and secretly I like that Ethan’s taking all this interest in my work.

“Whoa,” Ethan says when we land on an image of him and Stephen running through a field, their bodies blurring as they bolt toward the black sky. “That’s badass.” The late-afternoon sun is igniting the other side of the horizon, putting everything in sharp contrast. Ethan’s and Stephen’s shadows are deep and dark—almost solid enough to be two more people. Ethan points at them. “It’s like Ethan and Stephen Junior,” he jokes.

“Too bad we left them out there,” I reply. “I wonder if they got sucked up in the storm.”

“They probably found a ditch and covered their heads.”

“Oh, then I’m sure they were
fine
. I mean, what’s a two-hundred-mile-per-hour wind gust when you have your head covered?”

Ethan grins. “Exactly.”

We click through a few more images until a square-jawed motel employee rattles the pool gate. “This area is closed,” he says, like he caught us drinking or partying, instead of just sitting here.

“Sorry,” Ethan says, raising his hand in a half wave. “We’ll be out of here in a minute.” We collect our stuff as the motel Nazi watches. Lightning flashes in the distance, and Ethan pauses for a second to watch it.

“No matter how many times I see a storm,” he says, “I can’t get enough of them. Runs in the family, I guess.”

“What, chasing?”

“No. Addiction.”

I picture the mass of beer bottles in the recycling bin at home. I meant to haul them to the curb before I left, but didn’t get around to it.

“I don’t know about you,” Ethan continues, “but I don’t drink at all. If I go out, I’ll have a Coke. That’s it. Used to be I wouldn’t even go near a bar, but I’ve mellowed in my old age.” He winks at me, like joking about being twenty-three is hilarious.

Plenty of kids my age drink, but I’m like Ethan—I steer clear of it. I can’t even stand to be the designated driver at parties, because carting around sloppy drunk kids is the opposite of a good time in my book. On the weekends, I’m usually over at Cat’s, holed up in her basement watching movies.

“I know what we should do,” Ethan says after a moment. “You and I should find something completely benign and get hooked on it.”

“Like?”

“I don’t know. How about butter?”

I can’t help but giggle. “Maybe not. In large doses, it’s pretty fatty.”

“Insects?”

“Gross. How about shoes?”

“Too expensive,” Ethan says, as we shuffle past the motel Nazi. “How about stamps?”

“Meh. Boring.”

“Tiny dogs that never get any bigger than a hamburger?”

We’re inside now, and my laughter bounces off the hallway’s faded wallpaper and threadbare carpet. “Trained rabbits that can hunt and kill zombies?”

Ethan snorts. “Candy that never makes you fat but still tastes delicious?”

“Recyclable water bottles that automatically fill themselves?”

“Hamsters that can stop hurricanes?”

“That’s the one,” I say, sliding my motel card through my door reader. “That’s the winning idea.”