12. Ellie
— ? —
Ellie
The wind has been blowing all day.
I’ve been alone in the house since Jacob left before dawn.
The maids are somewhere, probably in their quarters, and the chef went home early because of the weather, and Daphne hasn’t come out of her room.
I’ve been sitting at the kitchen table watching the sky, watching the trees bend and sway, watching the clouds pile up darker and darker until the whole world has gone dim even though it’s only two in the afternoon.
I made coffee this morning and didn’t drink it.
I took Aunt June’s recipe box out and read three cards and put them back.
I called the office at nine to hear a voice and got the machine, and I didn’t turn the radio on because I didn’t want to hear a man in a studio tell me what I could see out my own window.
Around eleven I walked to the end of the west wing hallway and stood outside Daphne’s door and listened to her talking on the phone to somebody, laughing, and I walked back.
At noon I went out to the garden the way I do every day, to touch the tomatoes and tell them they’re doing fine, and the wind had them flat against the cages and the basil stripped down to stems, and I stood there with my hair whipping across my face and I couldn’t think of one thing to tell them.
I should have gone to work. I should have ignored Mr. Bellinger’s advice and driven into town and sat at my desk and typed letters and answered phones and pretended everything was normal.
Instead I’m sitting here in the house Jacob’s grandmother left him, in the kitchen I never chose, watching a storm roll in and thinking about what I said to him this morning and the look on his face when he walked out without kissing me goodbye.
The wind screams around the corner of the house and a limb bangs against the siding. I get up and look out the window and I can see branches coming down in the yard, big ones, the oaks dropping limbs before the worst of it hits.
At three-twelve, the siren goes.
I know what that siren means. Everyone in this part of Texas knows what that siren means. You get to the shelter. You get underground. You don’t wait, you don’t hesitate, you go.
I’m pulling on my boots when Jenna comes into the kitchen, white as a sheet, pulling at the hem of her sleeve.
“Mrs. Walker.” Her voice is shaking. “Mr. Walker called. He said he’s coming to get you himself. He said to wait in the house.”
My chest loosens. He’s coming. He didn’t forget about me. He’s coming to get me.
“Okay,” I say. “Thank you, Jenna. You should get to the shelter.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She doesn’t move right away. She stands there in the kitchen doorway with her eyes on the floor, and she opens her mouth, and then she closes it, and then she goes. I hear the back door slam behind her.
I sit down at the kitchen table to wait.
I put my boots on anyway. I lace them tight and I sit there with my hands flat on the table and I look at the back door and I think about him coming through it.
Wet, probably. Yelling at me for not being ready.
His hand on the back of my neck, hard, steering me out to the truck, and me letting him, and both of us not saying a word about the porch or the bedroom or any of it because there’d be a tornado on the ground and nobody argues in a tornado.
I’d have let him. That’s the thing. Whatever I said this morning, if he came through that door right now I’d let him put his hand on my neck and I’d go.
The wind is getting louder. I can hear it screaming around the corners of the house, can hear things hitting the siding, branches and debris and God knows what else.
The sky outside the window is getting darker by the minute, that gray-green deepening into black.
I watch the second hand on the kitchen clock sweep around. One minute. Two. Three.
I should go to the shelter. I know I should go to the shelter. But he said he was coming, he said to wait, and I wait.
Five minutes.
I pick up the kitchen phone to call the far shed and there’s no dial tone. Just a hum, and under the hum the wind. I set it back in the cradle and I pick it up again and it’s the same.
I get up and look out the window. The yard is chaos, branches flying, dust devils spinning across the grass. No truck.
Ten minutes.
I walk to the front door and open it and the wind nearly tears it out of my hands. I can see the path to the bunker across open ground, and the air is full of flying debris. No truck. No Jacob.
Fifteen minutes.
I close the door and lean against it and I think: this is wrong. This is wrong and I’m standing here waiting when I should be moving.
I go looking for the others so I can send them down.
The kitchen is empty, the stove cold, the dishes from breakfast still in the sink. The living room is empty, the curtains whipping in the draft from somewhere, a window not quite latched. The foyer is empty except for the wind howling through the cracks around the front door.
“Hello?” I call. “Jenna? Anyone?”
My voice gets swallowed by the wind.
I stand in the foyer and I listen the way I’ve learned to listen in this house, for a door at the far end, for the toilet in the west wing that I can never hear and always try to, and there’s nothing.
No doors. No water in the pipes. The house has never been this empty in the whole year I’ve lived in it.
Even at night there’s always somebody, a light on somewhere, a floorboard. Now it’s just the wind and me.
I check the maids’ quarters, walking fast now, my heart pounding.
I knock on doors and call names and push them open one by one.
Empty. The beds are made and the rooms are neat and nobody’s there.
In Jenna’s room there’s a picture of a little girl taped to the mirror, a girl with a gap in her front teeth, and a paper on the dresser from an orthodontist two towns over with a number circled at the bottom.
Their things are still here but they’re gone, they got out, they went to the shelter the way they were supposed to.
I go to the chef’s office. Empty. His keys are gone and his car must be too. He went home early, before the siren, before it got bad.
I go to Daphne’s room in the west wing. I knock and call her name and nobody answers, and I push the door open and the room is empty.
The bed is made and her suitcases are in the corner and her makeup is spread across the vanity, and there’s a wine glass on the nightstand with a lipstick print on the rim, but Daphne is gone.
Everyone is gone. Everyone got out. Somebody told every one of them to go, and they went, and nobody told me anything but wait.
And I’m still here because my husband said to wait.
I go to her window because it faces the yard, faces the shelter, and I look out.
The bunker door is on the far side of the lawn.
From here I can see people going in, ranch hands in their work clothes, someone carrying a lantern, the door propped open against the wind.
They’re filing in one by one. Hollis is at the door with his hat jammed down, holding it open with his whole body, waving them in.
The hands go past him two and three at a time with their heads down.
I watch them go, count the heads, and none of them are Jacob.
I watch. I wait. I press my hand against the glass.
The door stays open. The wind is trying to tear it off its hinges.
Then Jacob’s truck tears across the lawn and out of the edge of the window.
I run. Back through the west wing, through the kitchen, through the foyer to the front windows.
He’s at the bunker door, and I can see his mouth moving, shouting orders I can’t hear over the wind.
A UTV skids up behind his truck and a woman with red hair gets out of it and runs to him and grabs his arm.
He’s got one of the maids by the other arm.
He’s talking at her, fast, and she’s nodding, and then he lets her go and she goes through the door, and Daphne goes through the door ahead of him, and he stands there with his back to the house counting the rest of them past.
Daphne. He’s saving Daphne.
I scream his name through the glass. I pound on the window with my fists. He doesn’t turn around.
Hollis goes in last. Jacob goes in after him. The door closes.
I stand at the window with my hand on the glass and I watch the door shut and I can’t breathe. He’s in there. She’s in there. And I’m standing in a house with a green sky and a siren screaming and he didn’t even turn around.
I grab my phone and text him with shaking hands: I’m still in the house. Where are you.
No signal. The message sits there with a red exclamation point, and then one bar flickers and it goes, and the bar is gone again, and I don’t know if it went anywhere.
I look out the window at the yard. Debris is flying now, sheets of metal and branches and fence posts spinning through the air. The bunker is fifty yards away, and every one of them is flying metal and wood.
I can’t make it. It’s too late. I stand there and do the math the way he’d do it, the distance and my legs and the wind, and the answer is I’d be halfway when the next post came through, and I’d be lying in the grass where he could see me from the bunker door if he ever opened it.
A fence post comes through the front window, spinning end over end, and buries itself in the wall three feet from where I’m standing. Glass everywhere. Wind pouring through the hole, tearing at my clothes, my hair.
The pantry basement. The one under the kitchen, where I stood on a stepstool a week ago counting jars. It’s not built for storms, it’s built for storing food, but it’s underground and it’s got a heavy door and it’s the only chance I’ve got.
I run. Through the foyer, through the kitchen, through the pantry.
The narrow stairs are dark and steep and I take them two at a time.
The door is heavy, solid wood with a metal frame, and I drag it closed behind me and shove the bolt across and I crouch under the stairs with the freezers humming around me.
It smells like cold and cardboard down here, like the flour Jacob bought in fifty-pound sacks because he never learned to buy anything small.
The single bulb over the stairs is swinging on its cord.
I get my phone out and hold it up and there’s still nothing, not one bar, the text still sitting there with its red mark, and I put it face down on the concrete because I can’t look at it.
I’ve been down here a hundred times for a jar of tomatoes and I’ve never once looked up at the ceiling.
The house screams above me.
I can hear the roof coming apart. I can hear windows shattering, walls groaning, the whole structure twisting in the wind. The beam over my head cracks. I can hear it, a sharp splitting sound, and I look up and I can see the line running through the wood, spreading, widening.
The light flickers once, twice, and goes out.