She finished, closed the book, and set it on her lap. “That tree needs boundaries,” she said.
When Vietnam Tim and I got back to the house, my mother was readying her camera bag. “Diana,” she asked, “do you want to come with me today? Just the two of us?”
I was so excited to be asked that I didn’t pay attention to the fact that her eyes were red. That my father was nowhere in sight. Instead, I climbed into the blue Jeep that she and Vietnam Tim had driven up in yesterday. I didn’t ask where we were going, because that wasn’t the point.
It was about a half hour before she pulled to the side of the road, fussed with her camera bag, and started trudging across the withered landscape. I scrambled behind her, kicking up clouds of dust with my sneakers. “Where did Dad go?” I asked.
She stopped walking. Her hand fidgeted at her side. “Would you … would you rather be with him?”
“No,” I said immediately. “I like it here with you.”
Her breath gusted out and she nodded. Then she started walking again, with me trotting behind.
She stopped when we reached a field so dry it had cracked into a thousand shards. It looked like a shattered mirror, a broken windshield, tempered and held together only with sheer determination rather than the laws of physics. I found myself stepping backward gingerly, afraid to put even a toe on one of the rifts in the earth. What if I was the last straw, the pressure that broke it to pieces?
I thought about the ground giving way, swallowing us whole.
My mother bent down with her camera, trying to find a sight line for her shot. She edged one knee onto the web of crevices, and then another.
Later I would learn about people with trypophobia, who might look at a pattern like this and get queasy; of other people so afraid of the unknown they couldn’t leave the confines of their house. But at that moment, all I knew was that my world was literally crumbling beneath us.
“Mom,” I cried, panicking. “Don’t.”
She immediately sat back on her heels, surprised. “Diana?”
“What if it’s not safe?”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
But cycling through my head were all the times I wasn’t there to call her back from the literal edge of disaster; the million ways she could get hurt. And I’d be in New York, safe, not even knowing what had happened to her.
As if she could read my mind, she sat down, her camera settled on her knee. “I wasn’t made to stay at home,” she said softly, looking into her lap. “Some women, they love being mothers. They make it look easy. But I needed to know that there was still space for me to go off and do my work. Because then when I was home, I wouldn’t spend all my time wishing I was somewhere else.”
I stared at her. I knew she was trying to tell me something about herself, something about us, but all I could hear was I wasn’t made to stay at home, and the reverberating truth that I wasn’t enough to change that about her.
It struck me that my mother, who was not unsettled by rhino stampedes or the crossfire of drug cartels or raging brush fires, was nervous. “Do you get what I’m trying to say, Diana?”
I blinked at her. That she loved me? That she didn’t? That she was sorry? That it was all my fault?
My mother sighed. She turned the camera so that I could see the little two-by-three-inch LCD viewfinder. The photo she had taken of the parched land was a honeycomb, a pattern, whose fissures seemed lit from the belly of the earth. “You see,” my mother said. “Even broken things can be beautiful.”
I turned my face up to hers. And a drop of rain landed square on my forehead.
The sky was an unholy yellow by the time we reached the Next of Inn. There were sirens blaring from the town. Vietnam Tim was in front of the house, pointing across the parched field to the rolling storm, which was growling closer, its tail a black funnel of fury. Mrs. Evans was trying to get him to come into the cellar for safety.
My father had been standing on the porch, but as soon as he saw us he ran for the Jeep, scooped me into his arms, and dragged my mother with him to the cellar hatch. My mother was already fiddling with her camera. “But I need to—”
“No,” my father yelled. “You do not.”
Mrs. Evans followed us down there, still muttering about that fool Vietnam Tim. She sat down and tuned a little battery-powered radio to a station that was repeating the tornado emergency signal. We tucked ourselves between boxes of storage. Suddenly Vietnam Tim threw open the hatch doors. His eyes were wild, his hair electric. “It’s gonna reverse direction,” he yelled down. “A one-two punch.”