Before we left, my mother hugged me. “I’ll be home soon,” she promised, but she looked at my father as she said it. “I can’t leave before I finish the job.”
“I thought you were here for the rain,” I said.
“That was the job,” my mother agreed. “But now it’s something else.”
It was always something else.
I watched my mother tentatively move toward my father, and even more tentatively come close enough for her to brush her lips against his. There was only a second of hesitation, and then he kissed her back.
I fed Nitpick one last apple while my father put our suitcases into the rental car. As we drove to the airport I thought about something Vietnam Tim had said, when I asked him how a tornado ends.
The cold air above it breaks apart, he had told me. Or the storm just gets all ropy and weak.
In other words, one side gives up.
At the airport, the gate agent who checked us in looked at my passport. “Happy birthday!” she sang, all teeth, something my own mother hadn’t remembered to say.
The panic attack hit just as the plane leveled after takeoff.
What if a tornado comes now?
What if the plane just falls out of the sky?
What if the ground swallows us whole?
I started shaking so hard that my father, who was in the seat beside me with his eyes closed, felt it. He covered my hand with his. “What’s wrong, Diana?”
What I meant to say: Everything.
What came out: “I don’t want her to come home.”
His fingers stilled over mine, and then squeezed. “Of course you do,” he said, as if I’d just told him the sky is green when it obviously is blue.
I turned away from him, feeling betrayed. If anyone should understand, it would be him.
A fly that had stowed away on this flight buzzed in front of me, landing on the window. I watched it bat up against the thick glass, over and over, like it only now realized it had made a colossal mistake and wanted to be on the other side.
Because we had just flown in and it was my birthday, my father let me pick the takeout food. We ate Thai from the place I loved, where they always gave us free dumplings. My father scooped ice cream from a carton in the freezer and put a birthday candle in it and sang to me and we both pretended we were happy.
He told me I could unpack tomorrow after school, but I liked things in their proper places. So before I went to bed, I unzipped my little suitcase, planning to put my dirty clothes in the hamper and hang up the ones that needed to go in the closet.
On top of my clothes there was a folded note addressed in my mother’s handwriting.
Happy birthday, Diana, it said on the outside.
Inside was a list.