Chapter 7: The Weather Channel

Two weeks before the party, Charlotte and I were at the kitchen table with legal pads and cold cups of coffee, pretending the guest list mattered more than the tornado watch on the Weather Channel. I stepped outside to look around, and in a minute she joined me. Thin cumulus clouds were blowing in from the southwest, with darker clouds below. The wind seemed confused – wafting one way, then another. The air was thick and moist, and my shirt stuck to my back.

“Do you think we’ll get hit?” she asked nervously.

“Dunno,” I said. “Hope not.”

We went back into the kitchen, sat, and tried to focus. “Alright,” Charlotte said. “We can each invite thirty people. Realistically, maybe twenty will come.”

I nodded. “We’ll ask people to RSVP,” I said. “And assume a few will ignore that entirely.”

We began to write. “Who do you have so far?” I asked after a minute, glancing at the television. “Well, my parents, if you don’t mind. Sarah from college – and I hope she doesn’t bring her boyfriend. He can’t stop bragging about his job.”  She looked up. “You?”

I stared at my pad. Then my eyes went back to the screen. A red and purple band looked like it was about 60 miles west of us, but it was coming our way. I’d been through a few tornado near-misses since moving to Texas, and I didn’t like them. Tornadoes were kind of a childhood phobia growing up in Portland. Not because we had them, but because of watching The Wizard of Oz.

I went back to my list and ticked off a few names. “And Peter,” I said. “He’ll come alone.”

“We can put him to work, then,” Charlotte said. “He might enjoy helping with the food.”

I snorted. “You mean helping himself to more food.”

I looked at the radar on the screen again. An orange band of clouds coming out of the west had coalesced into a threatening blob of red. I thought I could make out a telltale hook of a tornado forming. Maybe forty miles away. If it was moving at thirty miles per hour, that gave us a little more than an hour – maybe less. I snapped my laptop shut. “Charlotte,” I said, Time to move.” She looked at me, then the television. Her eyes widened. “You lock up the house,” I said. “Get flashlights and candles. I’ll get the generator ready.”

I stood and strode to the door. “Be careful,” she said behind me.

Outside, I locked the shop, then wrestled the generator out of the barn. I topped off the gas and then punched the starter. The big machine barked to life – rude, loud, and comforting. I shut it off, then walked the property to secure any loose thing I could find. The trailer worried me, but I knew Airstreams were good at shrugging off wind.

A gust of wind whistled past, and I looked to the west. A band of dark clouds loomed threateningly. They formed an arch over the earth, its interior lit by shaft of sunlight that somehow worked its way through the darkness. Quick stabs of lightning flashed, and feathery bands of virga plunged down. To the north, one finger of clouds was beginning to spin, then descend from the darkness above it.

Like cotton candy, I thought absurdly.

For a moment I was mesmerized. Then the first fat drops hit the ground – hard enough to lift dust. I ran for the house through what was now pelting rain, and Charlotte opened the door before I reached it.

I peeled off my wet T-shirt in the entry, then grabbed a dry one. “Main floor bathroom,” I said quickly. “No windows. Let’s go.” I took her hand and pulled her down the hallway. A flash of white light came through a window, then thunder hit the house like a blunt instrument. I felt Charlotte flinch.

In the bathroom, we crouched in a corner beside the tub. Outside, the wind howled, and something slammed against the siding hard enough to rattle the plumbing. Charlotte leaned into me and I could feel her trembling. “This is terrifying,” she whispered. “I’ve never been through anything like this.”

Then the power died. The bathroom fan coasted to a stop. For a long moment there was nothing but wind – and that strange, animal roar a storm makes when it sits on top of you. Somewhere in the house, glass shattered – the sound of fragments skittering across tile. “Kitchen window,” I said, though I couldn’t be sure. I turned on a flashlight, and its beam caught dust shaken from the walls. I was convinced the house could not possibly take more.

I wrapped my arm around Charlotte’s shoulders. She pressed close, fingers tightening around my forearm. “Maybe we should play cards to pass the time,” she said. I looked at her incredulously. “What?” The house shuddered again. For a heartbeat I thought: This could be it. Or it could just be a story we get to tell. I hoped for the latter.

The roar of the storm became more of a demented shriek. Bits and pieces of I had no idea what were slamming into the side of the house like machine gun fire. Charlotte shouldered herself under my arm, put her hands over her ears, and began to weep with terror. I was about to do the same.

And then everything, somehow, did…what? I couldn’t tell. But the storm seemed to thin. There was not a silence – it was more like a flattening, as the storm’s roar smeared into a single long note. The darkness now felt less like darkness and more like absence. After another 10 minutes, it grew quiet; the rain fell loudly but compared to the earlier sounds it seemed inaudible. I exhaled. “It’s gone,” I said. “I think we made it.” I stood up and helped Charlotte to her feet, then opened the bathroom door.

We walked carefully to the kitchen. Broken shards of glass glinted on the floor. Now the storm was moving east. I could hear it in the rain – less fury, more of a steady insistence – and in the lightning, now sulking toward the eastern horizon. The sky beyond the broken window still glowed a sickly yellow.

A branch the size of a small tree jutted through the shattered glass, half in, half out, as if the house had tried to swallow it. “Jesus,” I said. Charlotte stared. “How did we sleep through this?” she asked. “It looks like a war zone.”

I looked at her. “We didn’t sleep through it,” I said.

“No?” she asked.

“No,” I said firmly. “We were in the bathroom. In the corner. You suggested we play cards to pass the time.”

“I did not.”

“You did.”

She frowned at me. “OK. If you say so.” The tone was wrong. Not dismissive, just oddly preassembled.

I started to answer, but she stepped closer to the shattered window. “Stop…” I tried to say. Too late. Her foot slipped on rainwater. She caught herself on the sill with her left hand. But her right forearm slid across a broken glass shard. I heard a thin, sharp inhale from her. Blood spread down her forearm almost immediately. “Don’t move.” I wrapped a dish towel tight around her forearm and lifted her hand toward her shoulder. In the dim light the towel went from white to gray to near black.

“It hurts,” she whispered. “A lot.”

“I believe you. Keep pressure.”

I got her seated, then walked quickly to the garage to grab the first aid kit. Once back, I took a closer look at the wound. It was not trivial, but it was manageable. No artery damage. I got another clean towel, had her hold pressure for a moment, then had her take it off. “This’ll sting,” I said, as I cleaned around the wound. I pulled the cut together with butterfly bandages, four in a neat row. She watched every movement. “You’re good at this,” she said softly. “Thank you for taking such good care of me.”

“You don’t have to lay it on quite so thick,” I said. I almost laughed, although of course I liked being seen as the hero.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I’m not always sure how much is enough.”

 “Well,” I said. “I appreciate being told I’m good at something. But when you say it three times it loses some impact.” She looked at me and nodded.

I pulled on a raincoat and went outside to start the generator. Lights came on, and the television as well. The Weather Channel replayed the radar loop, the hook echo sliding north of us. “Half a mile away,” I said. Charlotte watched the screen, her bandaged arm propped on a pillow. “We were smart to shelter in the bathroom,” she said. “Your quick thinking probably kept us safe.”

I turned to her. “You said that earlier.”

Her brow furrowed. “I did?”

“Pretty close.”

I gave her two Tylenol and checked the bandages. No new bleeding. She curled up in the recliner under a blanket, drifting in and out of exhausted sleep while wind threaded through the broken window frame.

When she seemed comfortable, I brought a trash can inside and spent an hour picking up bits of glass. Then I woke Charlotte, and we ate scrambled eggs. We drove to urgent care, where it was two hours before a tired-looking physician’s assistant cleaned the wound, placed five stitches, and nodded approvingly at the butterfly closures. “Good work,” he said. “You got her here in time. Not much risk of infection. But we’ll want to watch this.”

On the way home, Charlotte cradled her arm and watched the debris along the road slide past her view. Branches, metal, something that looked like a tractor-shed door. “That was awful,” she said.

“We got through it,” I said.

“We did.” A pause. “Thank you for taking us into the bathroom. For keeping us safe.”

“You remember that?”

A small hesitation. “I remember you saying we went in there,” she said. “I know that’s where we were. The rest is… outlines.” That was all. Back home, I settled her on the couch, tucked a pillow under her arm, and started a rom-com. She closed her eyes.

I walked back to the bathroom. The corner where we’d crouched was exactly as we’d left it. Towel on the floor, flashlight tipped over, a faint scuff on the wall. I stood there and tried to recall the moment. The tilt of the house, the sound of shattering glass, her fingers gripping my arm in the dark. I could feel it immediately.

But she didn’t seem to. Not quite.

When I returned to the living room, she was awake, a blanket around her shoulders, stitched arm resting on a pillow. “How does it look out there?” she asked.

“Messy,” I said. “New glass comes in a few days. Rest of the house is fine. A few missing shingles, and we lost an apple tree.”

She gave me a long look. “You remember it all better than I do. I feel badly about that – I really do want to see things more like you do. I think that would be good for us. Don’t you?”

I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it. Tried again.

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

I let the blank space sit between us.

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