“Come down here before you get killed,” my father said.
Vietnam Tim grinned. “And miss all the fun?” He closed the metal doors.
Even with my head buried against my father’s chest, I could hear the tornado. It sounded like a hundred trains clattering on the same track. I heard glass shattering and car alarms and fire alarms and house alarms and then the monkey shriek of Nitpick.
That’s when Mrs. Evans lost it. She tossed aside the radio and raced up the ladder, throwing open the metal doors and trying to get to the barn.
“Fuck,” my father said. He put me down on the floor and looked at me and then my mother. “Do not move.” And then he took off after her.
I screamed for him, but my voice was carried away by the wind. My mother stood up and calmly climbed the wooden steps that led out of the open cellar hatch, like a queen walking to her beheading. She stood half in and half out of the cellar, looking out at Vietnam Tim with his chin pointed to the sky. “That’s the cold front,” he cried. “It’s gonna shift back again.”
Just as quickly as it had started, everything went still.
Between-heartbeats still. Hold-your-breath still.
Vietnam Tim’s hair fluttered to lay flat against his scalp again. The wind disappeared. My mother walked outside, and I followed her, like I was tied by a thread.
The gazebo in the front yard was just … missing. The flowerpots were smashed and all the windows on the first floor of the inn had shattered. The twister was distant, undulating, like it was plotting its next move.
“Is it over?” I whispered.
My mother didn’t look at me. “Yes,” she breathed. “And no.”
The leaves at my feet started dancing as the wind picked up pace. The barn door opened, and my father came out, one arm braced around Mrs. Evans, who was sobbing.
Another tornado siren pierced the silence. My feet felt like they were rising, like I was a balloon.
Vietnam Tim locked eyes with my mother. “Wanna go chase it?” he asked.
“Hannah,” my father cried.
She turned to him, her face wide open, as if we couldn’t already see the parts of her that were missing.
How could you ask me to choose?
She was moving toward the blue Jeep before I could grab for her. My father bolted into action, snatching me into his free arm and dragging me and Mrs. Evans to the cellar again, even though the wind had risen so fast that it felt like we were pushing against an invisible wall.
We tumbled inside to safety. As my father struggled to close the hatch, I saw the Jeep drive off, moments before the entire barn was flung into the sky.
It took four minutes for the world to be destroyed again.
When my father and I went looking for her, hand in hand, the ground was covered with ice crunching under my feet. But it turned out it wasn’t hail, it was glass. Shrapnel and splinters and the spoils of a war, the enemy long gone.
The town of Ochelata was a war zone, but it had been a discriminating battle. The side of the street with Pete’s bar on it had been demolished. The restaurant, on the other side, remained pristine and untouched. Some houses we passed had no glass in the windows anymore, others had trees upended with the roots now scraping the sky. Some were missing porches, fences, roofs. Others looked exactly like they had this morning.
The home beside the Next of Inn had been completely ripped off its foundation, and reset gently in the middle of the street.
We returned to the inn without my mother. Mrs. Evans was sitting on the porch. “Has she—” my father asked, and the innkeeper just shook her head.
I wandered to the fence where I’d stood with Vietnam Tim; it was still intact. I wanted to blink and wake up in a world where the past two days had never happened.
I rested my forehead on the flat railing and felt a tug on my shirt, plus a hot gust of air. When I looked up, Nitpick was eating the hem.
But before I could tell Mrs. Evans, the blue Jeep drove up. Vietnam Tim got out from the driver’s side and executed a little bow. “I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.”
By the time my mother unfolded herself from the passenger seat, her face glowing and her eyes snapping with excitement, I was already racing toward her. I threw my arms around her waist, hugging her so close you couldn’t sew a seam between us.
My father walked toward us, an inferno.
“Paul,” my mother said gently, soothing. “What’s important is that I’m fine. That we’re all fine.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Is that really what you think is important?”